Monthly Archives: May 2012

I, Mother

Every year on Mother’s Day I feel let down.  Everywhere I look are reminders that it’s Mother’s Day.  In the street, when I take my morning walk, I see children carrying flowers to Grandma’s house, and families decked out in their Easter Sunday best coming out of restaurants sated from celebratory Mother’s Day Brunch, and strangers call out, “Happy Mother’s Day!”  When I get to work today, the dispatcher who supervises the buses during my shift, whom I have come to like and look forward to seeing, won’t be there.   Her husband bought her an I-Phone 4S for this day, and she booked off  to enjoy a day with her feet up, learning the in’s and out’s of her new toy.  My Mother’s Day is just another Sunday, except that I write anti-war emails and FB posts while I watch a flurry of new ads telling me what I should be receiving as gifts.  How can I not succumb to jealousy?

I have to remind myself that I made it so.  When my kids were little, I scoffed at the ads for the Hallmark Holiday the day had become, and I told them that I didn’t subscribe to the notion of a day to say thank you.  I have a day already; it’s my very own day, my birthday.  Honor me and respect me and love me all the days of your life; celebrate my birth on its day.  But don’t buy into the aberration of this day.  Let’s keep Mother’s Day as it was originally intended: a day of contemplation on the horrors of war.

In 1870, Julia Ward Howe, the poet who (perhaps ironically) authored The Battle Hymn of the Republic, pushed for the adoption of a day, a mothers’ day, set aside to remind people of the true nature of war, the true  cost.  War was, in her estimation, a simple carnage, the wasting of mothers’ sons’ lives by other mothers’ sons.  Later, she averred that the “collateral damage” of war was also the annhilation of mothers’ children, and Mother’s Day should be a day when mothers stand up and insist that their children not be slaughtered and that their children not be sent out to destroy other mothers’ lives.

I take this day very seriously.  I am a mother, neither a good mother nor a bad mother, but a mother who would be devastated by the loss of any of my children.  I weep for women who do not predecease their offspring; it’s a suffering I never want to endure.  I don’t need flowers or candy to prove to me my kids and grands love me; each of them shows me that in her/his own way.  What I do need is to be sheltered from the worst horror I could imagine: one of them being swept up by hatred and bloodlust, by politics and insanity, by the firestorms of war.

Julia Ward Howe

It’s Mother’s Day.  Let there be peace.

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts,
Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears
Say firmly:

“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies
Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of
charity, mercy and patience.

We women of one country
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. . . .”

                                                         Julia Ward Howe
                                              Mother’s Day Proclamation
1870

A Mother’s Day Gift to My Children: A Remembrance of Charlotte Esther Robinson Swett – Part I

Charlotte Esther Robinson, University of Vermont, Class of ’44

 Charlotte Esther Robinson Swett, my mother, never knew how very much I admired her.  We were, for many years, closer than most mothers and daughters, but she couldn’t know the depth of my esteem for two reasons.  First, this complex woman never quite internalized the breadth of her inestimable value; and second, I never quite understood the scope of my emotions.  So I write this now for my children and grandchildren.  They need to know.

When I was small, my cousins referred to our grandmother as Mama, but I could never muster the word; she wasn’t anything like a Mama to me.  She was harshly critical, emotionally cruel, and I recognized early on that she had not even earned the right to that moniker from the woman I knew was my Mama.  Grandma had suffered terribly in her life, and in her last twenty years, after she found sobriety and a modicum of peace, especially after my grandfather died and liberated her from her subservience, she became a friend and a confidante, but it was clear to me that as a mother, she had provided no model for my mother to emulate, had failed to nurture and protect her daughters, and had damaged them all irreparably.

My mama shared her life with me in timid drabs over late night vigils.  My father was a traveling salesman, and he was often on the road into the wee hours of the night; it was I who kept her company while she waited, always frightened that the worse might have happened.  Fearing the worst was a learned response to a life of worsts, but she found them difficult to tell, difficult to explore, and until I was twelve, all I really knew were the funny stories.  One was the story of her birth, which she told between gales of girlish giggles that invariably made me laugh too . . . until I was old enough to get it.

Picture Postcard Vienna, 1918

“I was born on a crystal clear Viennese night in April, 1923,” she would begin; she was only eleven months younger than her sister Thea, born in 1922, who was four years younger than their first sister Herma, born in 1918.  “Mama told me there wasn’t a cloud in the sky outside her window, just a glittering sliver of moon.  But poor Papa was devastated. He was sure this time he would finally have a boy.  He had put his head at Mama’s belly, and he was certain that this time he would be father to a son. He was so excited he could not sit still for most of the 9 months of the pregnancy.  I often imagine my Papa’s reaction when the doctor came out of the delivery room to tell him he had a big, robust, healthy daughter!  He went crazy.  Mama didn’t see him for weeks . . . maybe even months.  The story changed whenever she told me.  But when he did come back, he was determined not to be disappointed, and from then on he encouraged me to be a tomboy, which was just fine by me!

Why I Hated Bridesmaids

I know this is not a popular point of view, but I hated Bridesmaids.  Everyone I know who saw the movie, including people I respect and admire and listen to assiduously, said it was laugh-out-loud funny, poignant, great fun.  I found it tiresome, pedestrian, contemptible.

I think the thing I hated most was the way it depicted the women’s relationships, which rang absolutely true and was entirely unamusing.  I am not entertained anymore by the way we women find it so difficult to support one another, by the way in which we seek to undercut our sisters’ best efforts.  The schadenfreude women have for other women is stultifying, and, in this day of diminishing women’s’ rights, or what Sarah Silverman adroitly (if with somewhat ill-advised timing) calls the Real War on Women, we should be doing all we can to give one another a boost whenever we can.

Or perhaps it hearkens back to an attitude I developed in my youth when I was the oldest of a large family of misbehavers.  We were all wont to fight among ourselves, and we were often hyper critical of one another.  But if anyone on the outside was looking in, we banned together and sang one another’s praises.

Women don’t do that.  They allow politicians to call their co-genderists unthinkable names (Remember how Hillary was treated during the pre-nomination campaign?  Notice how anyone who decries the erosion of our rights is assailed?  Are you hearing the kinds of names Sarah Silverman, Anne Roiphe,  et al., have been labeled with by so-called feminists lately?), and they put up with discrimination at every level of our society.

Back in 1969, a month before Stonewall, my roommate and best friend attempted suicide.  It was a gruesome experience, and I won’t detail it here.  Suffice it to say that when he came out of his stupor and took a look at the world around him, what caught his attention and ultimately made him fight his way back to sanity was the Stonewall Uprising.  I have a vivid mental picture of his telling me, as he lay in his bed in the psychiatric ward at St. Vincent’s, “If the gay community is willing to stand with me, why should I lay down and die?”

Had my friend been female, I believe he would have died.  We women never had a Stonewall.  And more often than not, I feel like my sisters would prefer I lay down and die rather than stand next to them and make them feel diminished by me.  Or threatened or embarrassed by me.

And all the while, the glass ceiling turns acrylic and indestructible and our dominions over our bodies is diminished and our sense of empowerment is undermined.  And we let ourselves be led by people who don’t have our best interests at heart, who want to see us walk down the aisle to self-destruction and live unhappily-ever-after.

It’s not funny.

A Woman’s Project

I returned to New York City in 2005, long after my “Sell by” date had expired

In 2005, I left the relative comfort of a tremulous marriage and a tumultuous job (drama director/English Teacher) — the details of which are best left to fiction where they will embarrass no one’s children — to pursue my writing career. I knew the transition would not be easy, but having been raised by a Puritan Calvinist father and a mother who’d escaped Europe in 1939, I felt prepared for whatever difficulty might befall me. It seemed that the year’s pay I had vested in my pension along with the portion of my mother’s inheritance that I didn’t give to my children, would, at the very least, get me to a good job in New York, where I would then begin to write in earnest.

New York today is a cleaner, sparklier version of the city I left in my young adulthood; it’s no longer the nurturing artist’s environment I remember from those days. (Photo by Aaron Newman)

It’s a tale, as I think about it, worthy of Flaubert. Except that I was well past young when I ventured out of the provinces into the promise of new life in the city, and I had no idea what incredible bias I would be up against.

In the early days of my wife-and-motherdom, I had taken on a number of jobs (part-time, so long as we could afford to have me home part-time and then full-time as our financial needs grew), had served on boards and managed schedules and even had acted as interim director of a Day School.  I was an inveterate multi-tasker.

As a teacher, in addition to serving as Vice President of the State’s Drama Association and as a member of our NEA (teacher’s union) Negotiations team, et al., I had produced and directed two shows a year for ten years, had run a very successful summer program in one town for 7 then got a grant from the State to operate a Summer Conservatory program in another for two; I had raised and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and had always brought my programs back to the black. I did my own marketing and publicity, made my own deals with state-wide vendors, hired my own musicians, designers and construction crews. I created dialogue between my students and professional theaters around the country, and I personally arranged at least two annual trips to New York for a performance and a talkback/tour with the cast and crew of the show we saw. For the summer grant program, which required professional theater people to serve in their professional roles as well as to teach, I auditioned, hired and oversaw all manner of talent and crews from New York, provided them with transportation, housing, and meals while I made sure they got paid, and at the same time I produced/directed Sweeney Todd and produced As You Like It in repertory. And in addition to everything else, I had co-authored and produced three short films, two of which had garnered festival prizes

In short, I had taken on many responsibilities — always — and had honed a great many skills. Yet when I began to hunt for jobs in NY, it became quickly apparent that out in the world there are two distinct types for whom professional people have a blanket distrust: older women and teachers. Ooops.

Older women are invisible. They are no longer classifiable. Even though there is a great deal made about the Cougar women men crave, most men don’t even look at most women over 50. Even those who are attractive, fit, vital women get very little attention. And what that means is that women don’t look at them either. Worse, the invisibility somehow makes them less desirable as new hires. Who wants to clutter an office — or, in my case, a theater — with invisible drones? I applied for every possibly suitable job, from education director to personal assistant, posted in America over the course of the two years it took me to realize I was un-hirable. But being over fifty was only part of it.

People in the “real” world believe that teachers go into education because they can’t do. And we all know how easy teaching is! Anyone can do it — so why would you hire someone who “only” knows how to teach? I talked myself hoarse about the various skills I had developed in my various capacities as a “teacher,” but my words fell on deaf ears. One young woman who was interviewing me for a job I could do with my eyes closed effused at me, “Oh, you were a class advisor too? You must love going to proms.”

And the irony was that even for teaching I was now too old to be hired in a new system. When I was shortlisted for a great part-time job in an Alternative High School that would have been perfect for me, the interviewer told me, “I could lose my job for this, but I want to tell you that even though you are my first choice for this position, you won’t get the job.” She went on to tell me that I had “years in”, which required money, and I was no longer “fresh.”

Though guiding is certainly not a dream job, it does pay the cookie bills

So, as my little nest egg began to dwindle — I didn’t fight my husband for what I should have insisted on having after 33 years of marriage, believing I’d find a great job to sustain me very quickly — I took a job in the surreal world of tourism and became a sightseeing guide. Now nearing 65, armed with an arsenal of words, two master’s degrees and a compendium of otherwise useless information collected with my autodidact’s obsession with New York City, wearing my royal blue uniform shirt and a thick coat of sunscreen, I trudge daily down to the place where the tour buses originate. There I endure the abuse by passengers who range from insensitive to moronic, and I allow myself to be ordered around by bosses, many of whom are recently released, convicted felons, and by over-eager ticket sellers, who tend to be newly arrived African immigrants  (priceless few of whom have a shred of empathy for women in general or older women in particular), and then I go home to sleep.

I do this because it allows me every morning to get up before the sun and revel in the knowledge that I have a few hours of precious writing time, and someday soon . . . . well who knows!  I’ve just finished a book, which will be released this month, and I am writing furiously in a way I haven’t since I was a teenager filling journals with self-absorbed ruminations.

I am not alone out here. There are any number of women who have set out to create new lives for themselves, to forge careers in creative endeavors; and I have discovered, after a lifetime of feeling disconnected from women and intimidated by the judgmental, dogged competition friendship with them engendered, that for the first time in my life, I have a true kinship with some of the most remarkable people on the planet. Amazingly, they are women!

It’s been a rough road, and it’s not getting easier any time soon. I know that. I accept it. But I hope to live long enough and to prosper sufficiently to make it easier for someone else. Some day I would dearly love to open a safe house, a home for women like me who have held in their overflowing creativity for too many years and just need a place where they can live and write or paint or study lines or clean their cameras or do whatever they need to do to fulfill the need to DO without fear of eviction and starvation. A fear I carry in my stomach at the end every single month. It’ll be at least a while before I’m where I can even think about making the dream house real. But I want to start the process of providing support right here and right now. In this, my new blog, I will inaugurate a series about some of my most admired, most loved friends, women who, like me, have risked absolute failure in the pursuit of resounding success. A section of this blog will be dedicated to those women who would like to be featured here. That will debut shortly.

My cousin Anna Thea Bogdanovich, one of the women I admire most, seated in a pantheon of creative women at the Museum of Arts and Design

I dedicate my efforts to my daughters and my granddaughters. May they never be invisible. Or disrespected for having lived.