Leaving Supper and Sleep: Natalie Merchant Makes Poetry into Music

Natalie Merchant’s latest album is a treasure. She takes American and British poems about children and childhood and sets them to all kinds of melodies and instruments: the accordion, cello, banjo, harp, clarinet, and flute; the bass, oboe, French horn, and violin. The effect is a magical journey with beautiful lyrics.

I admit that when I first heard about this project, I was skeptical. Poetry and music have elements of each other, but they are separate genres for a reason. I teach poetry; I love it and respect it, but I thought that making poems lyrics would spoil them, take away their inherent beauty and depth.

I was wrong, and seriously underestimated Merchant’s talent. If someone else tried this, it’s quite possible that they’d fail miserably. But diligent research, exploration, planning, and six years of composing helped the former 10,000 Maniacs frontwoman create one of the most fantastic albums I’ve heard in a long time. Each song feels like a magical, mystery escape into a dream world. Old language and imagery, paired with myriad string and folk instruments hearkens of warm days in the country, girls shaking ankle-length skirts as they spin with flowers in their hair. Before listening to Leave Your Sleep, I had not heard or read any of the poems Merchant adapts, but they quickly and easily enter your brain and enchant you with a not too distant, soulful past.

The album’s two discs–the first called “Leave Your Supper”; the second, “Leave Your Sleep”–are set inside a colorful book of lyrics, each a poem in its original form, complete with a photograph of the poet and a description of his or her life. The first song, a poem Charles Causley called “Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience,” is about a young boy who asks a sailor to bring him back toys his travels, but learns, years later, the ravages of war. Most of the poems are more cheerful, however. The second, perhaps my favorite on the album, is a simple melody called “Equestrienne”:

And nothing that moves on land or sea

Will seem more beautiful to me

As the girl in pink on the milk-white horse

Cantering over the sawdust course.

Merchant pulls from even more traditions in “The King of China’s Daughter,” using the erhu and dizi flute as she sings of “the nutmeg grove.” Ogden Nash’s poem, “Adventures of Isabel” starts off the second disc–a folk ballad about a fearless girl who tackles a bear, a witch, a giant, even a doctor, and uses their strengths against them. One can’t help but laugh at the regretful creature in “The Sleepy Giant” who “used to pick up and voraciously chew / The dear little boys whom [he] met.”

The end of the album turns a bit more somber–a Gerard Manley Hopkins piece about sorrow, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney’s 19th century poem about the plight of Native Americans. Yet the entire album is a celebration of the children we have been and still can be, if we open ourselves up to the beauties of the world with wide and imaginative ears.

Time Is a Goon: Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Time is a goon,” says Bosco, a character who doesn’t appear until midway through Jennifer Egan’s new book, A Visit from the Goon Squad.

“The question I want to hit straight on…[is] how did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about?”

Bosco is a has-been, former frontman for the 1980’s band The Conduits, now inflicted with cancer, obesity, and gray hair. In “A to B” (chapter seven), he implores his publicist, Stephanie, to help him promote what he calls a Suicide Tour, his last hurrah before death. In fact, he hopes the tour will cause his death. He wants his suicide to be an art form.

Where does Jennifer Egan come up with these ideas?

Bosco’s publicist is Stephanie, wife to Bennie Salazar, a famous and successful record producer. Bennie is the boss to Sasha, the subject of the introductory story, “Found Objects,” first published in The New Yorker in 2008. Sasha is a kleptomaniac who in some way haunts each subsequent story (or chapter): a ghost of time past, present, and future.

Egan created her latest book as a series of narratives, each connected to the other pieces through characters who appear and disappear in prior and subsequent chapters. The stories can stand alone; Egan has made sure not to label her latest work a novel. But it’s not a book of short stories, either. The reader pushes through chapters with the same momentum as she would a novel, with the same inquiries about conflicts and characters. Where did they go next? Where have they been? Where will they end up?  Time is a goon–as Bosco says–in that it doesn’t stop, doesn’t relent. It just keeps on going, or it kept on going, and characters find themselves…well, here, in chapter ten (“Out of Body”), or there, in chapter two (“The Gold Cure”), which chronologically, happened after chapter ten. Phew. Each time a character reappears, we are struck with the obvious realization that people, everywhere, keep on living their lives whether they are still part of ours or not.

Modern society is a facebook and Twitter society. We are haunted by our past, just as we are haunted by characters who disappear and flicker like ghosts throughout Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. That friend from elementary school is living somewhere now; we know, because we see the pictures on facebook. A former coworker tweets that she is growing her own lettuce. The same astonishment, allure, and voyeurism exists in Egan’s latest artistic exercise. We find out about Bennie Salazar’s failed marriage in the second chapter, but we aren’t told exactly what happened until chapter seven. A teenager who falls in love with Bennie’s mentor appears later, at his death. Bennie’s wife’s boss has a downfall of her own, and her daughter grows up to work for him.

In some way, all of our lives are intertwined, and in other ways, they are not. We just pass on the street with a steady gaze, not knowing the story of the person whose air we breathe for a short time. But Egan’s characters are not sentimental; they are mysterious and detached, which adds to their allure. The story of Sasha that opens the novel shows us a woman struggling with an addiction, a desire for adventure or connection to another human, but she holds us–as she holds everyone–at a distance. Finally, we see her through a younger person’s point of view, and while there is joy in the progress Sasha has made, there is also awkwardness in what we know about her past.

Egan is, in my opinion, a hip and accessible literary genius in plain clothes. Her books are thought-provoking and innovative when it comes to the power of fiction and imagination. A Visit from the Goon Squad is quite an accomplishment in this postmodern, modern world. When we think we’ve conquered all other things, Egan reminds us that we can never forget our past–or when we do, our past remembers us.

Reading Nafisi

I just finished Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, and I feel like I just travelled to a place that will remain in my heart indefinitely. I thought I had to read Nabokov’s Lolita first, so I finally picked Reading Lolita up, ironically, two years after Nabokov’s weird anti-hero fluttered out of my life and started collecting dust on the shelf. Now I know, of course, that most of Nafisi’s book is a personal and professional biography, and not about Lolita at all, so it wasn’t a problem that I forgot most of the novel. (Though Nafisi does spin an analysis so complicated in the first 50 pages, you might think you’re in an English literature seminar).

Because I am a teacher, I love reading what other teachers’ experiences are like, and I can tell Nafisi is brilliant at her job. She even taught me how to read Jane Austen with more appreciation, something I didn’t think could happen at this point in my life. (I now know–to my own amusement–that Charlotte Bronte was not a fan of such passionless prose, but Nafisi goes head-to-head with her claim and wins me over.)

Most of all, this book is about the power of fiction, and what it can teach us in different contexts. Nabokov’s Humbert is a criminal, sure, but reading him in the context of revolutionary Iran makes most Iranian men who marry young virgins look like criminals. As Nafisi shows in her stories of women’s book club and class discussions, fiction serves as an escape for readers who are in suffocating situations. While many of the fundamentalists she interacts with–mostly students–think these books teach lessons about Western immorality, more open-minded students see themselves or who they hope to be in the works Nafisi offers them.

The book also becomes a warning about what happens when fundamentalism goes too far, and the awkward intersection of art and ideological politics. So many students Nafisi teaches feel that they, as Iranians and Muslims, should not be exposed to characters who act out of selfish desires, or women who do not observe and respect their place in society. They want to be taught the simple, direct lessons that their religious leaders have conveyed. It scares them to have to imagine or consider new and different behaviors or lifestyles and the complex moral implications that result. A wandering mind is not clean or neat, because you might not like what you come up with. This is precisely why our minds need to wander if we are to understand humanity a little better: why we need to read fiction.

While I am grateful to have learned so much about the revolutionary history of Iran through Nafisi’s eyes, her book also serves as a reminder about how vigilant we need to be about our own civil liberties. Iran was a vibrant, cultural center until the revolution, and has now become a world-wide example of cruel tyranny. The only way we can protect ourselves, it seems, is to continue exploring, discussing, reading–through education, and for some of us, through teaching.

The most recent developments in Iran make Reading Lolita in Tehran all the more powerful, and the pleas of the Iranian people even more heart-wrenching. Reading Lolita will change the way you read.

The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Messud

I recently devoured this book, and to continue the metaphor, felt that I had eaten too much. At first, Messud’s wit and quick-paced chapters were alluring. In the beginning, the developing story was certainly living up to the quote from the New York Times Book Review that is written on the cover, that it is a “masterly comedy of manners.” Could Messud be the Edith Wharton of our modern age?

It takes a little while to figure out how so many characters, each with his or her own introduction in alternating chapters, relate. But after 50 pages or so, we see that Messud is describing New York at the turn of the 21st century, and particularly, the lives of educated, hip, artistic folks who are turning the corner of the third decade of their lives. For a while, it is fun to read about the penthouse apartment that ’60’s liberal journalist Murray Thwaite lives in with his lawyer wife, Annabel, and meandering daughter, Marina, who wants to do something really important with her life, but who just can’t manage to finish the book for which she has gotten a contract–of course, of course, because her father is a famous journalist–a book about children’s fashion. (As her father later regretfully reports to her over a fancy lunch, the book is stupid. Marina thinks he is jealous of her impending success, mostly due to the persuasion of her up-and-coming journalist husband. In Messud’s world, everyone in Manhattan is some sort of journalist.) Danielle, Marina’s dear friend since college, is much more stable; she has a job as a documentary filmmaker, and is wavering between a project about the Aborigines and government in Australia vs. a documentary on the perils of liposuction in America. Enter the third friend of the college trio, Julius, who is an occasional writer for the Village Voice, and whose penchant for cocaine and adulterous affairs in bathroom stalls results in a tooth-marked scar on his cheek from an angry lover.

But Frederick Tubb–nicknamed Bootie by his mother–is possibly the most central character to the story. He is the young moralist who can’t help but see the superficiality in everything, especially college academia. Once he finds out that fellow students, with blissful ignorance from their professors, can easily cheat on exams and want to, he decides to pursue his life of the mind independently of school. Here is where this small-town boy intersects with the cruel, loud world of Manhattan. He is Thwaite’s nephew, wishfully, his successor, but even the staunch civil-rights advocate and Vietnam protester has flaws, Bootie realizes; taking a cue from Ralph Waldo Emerson, he attempts to expose them.

The novel continues with the minutiae of daily life in Manhattan and in the Thwaites country house in upstate New York. Adulterous affairs and romantic trysts ensue; bad books are written or are considered, new magazines burgeon among the yuppies; young moralists become jaded and fight back. Messud does a good job of helping you forget that she’s set her tale at the turn of the century in Manhattan–it could be now, 2008–but it’s not, as we are sorrowfully reminded when the characters enter the month of September in 2001. Yet, while I began to suspect a sort of homage to Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies, where he similarly narrates the goings-on of friendly and more plain, less rich, folks in and around Brooklyn before September 11th, the end fell a little flat. What were all the fast-paced chapters for? What were these characters speeding toward? Had anyone, really, come of age? Is there a moral, and who the heck is the emperor?

I don’t typically expect lessons from my novels, but Messud’s begs for one by the end. Is there some relevance to the turn of the century, the turn of their 30th-year, and the turn of the world’s expectations about safety, evil, war, terrorism? All that we’re really left with is the discomfort of acknowledging that Messud’s portrayal of these characters shows them to be so absent of morality, integrity, and worldliness, so full of ambition, money, and fleeting pleasures, that by the end, little can be done to negate the criticisms made by fundamentalist organizations. Is she just telling elite New York like it is, or missing New York completely? The only redeemable characters in this novel are older women: Judy, Bootie’s mom, who worries about him and misses him terribly as she continues the job of teaching second-graders; Annabel, a children’s lawyer, whose concern over one of her teenage clients keeps her up at night; and Randy, Danielle’s mom, who rushes to her daughter’s side during a depression to offer succor. If anything, maybe what we can take from the end of Messud’s novel is that if these Manhattanites are to be exposed as the fools they are, at least they’ll have their mothers.

I want to believe that the book is a satire, but I can’t laugh at the characters; I can only feel disdain for them as the prettiness is stripped away and the core shows itself to be rotting. I suppose this is the point, the harsh one. Even though I’m not a huge fan of New York–its bigness, loudness, overweening pride about itself on bumper stickers, t-shirts, the mouths and minds of its inhabitants, I still don’t know that it’s that point I want to swallow post-9/11.

Castles: Egan’s The Keep vs. Walls’ The Glass Castle

Jennifer Egan’s The Keep is a novel of ideas you can tell she’s been ruminating on for a while. For one, the main character, Danny, is compulsive about “keeping connected”: he starts to go a little crazy if he’s away from his cell phone or internet for too long. He lives in New York City and spends his time going to clubs, checking email, texting friends, and for some reason, wearing eyeliner (a detail I didn’t think necessary), all because he can’t bear to be outside of the buzz.

But it’s also a novel about the imagination. The setting is a medieval castle somewhere between Germany and Czechoslovakia that can’t be found on a map. It’s a place that represents the part in our minds between what we can comprehend and what we can’t, a dream world, perhaps. And there’s just something about a medieval castle that evokes the imagination like nothing else. Egan’s descriptions help: crumbling walls, decaying pools, torture-chamber basements, and stone rooms with velvet sheets atop mattresses open to the rain and the birds. There’s also a baroness whose appearance changes depending on the amount of 19th century wine you drink. The main idea that Egan wants to communicate is that we must find some escape from the daily barrage of visual images, the constant hum of modern technology. This theory manifests itself most in the character of Howard, whose dream is to make the castle an old-age hotel. No television, no phones, no consumption. Just fireplaces and comfy clothes and one’s own thoughts. If you like to read but constantly feel the pull of a ringing phone or new Inbox messages, this seems just about as close to heaven as you can get, while it makes Howard’s cousin, Danny, nauseous.

Lastly, Egan’s novel is an exploration of storytelling. The text is layered, a story with an intricate plot told by three different voices. Throw in a mild discussion of the prison system, drug-addiction, writing as a process, and the difference between Europe and America, and The Keep becomes a fantastic novel about the contemporary mind.

Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle–a memoir–is, on the other hand, a less involved story. I wish it were a little more about ideas, particularly what parents’ obligations should be to their kids. Walls is a gossip columnist for MSNBC.com, and The Glass Castle ends up just being one big dish on her loopy parents and childhood. Presented in short vignettes, Walls doles out snapshot after snapshot of the irrational philosophies and decisions her parents made while she was growing up with her siblings. The potential of the book, however, is evident in the beginning, as Walls describes seeing her homeless mother rummaging through trash cans in Manhattan. Then she flashes back to her first memory of childhood, her dress catching on fire while she makes hot dogs at the age of three. This is surprising stuff, and anyone reading wants to find out what the parents were thinking, how Walls became an established writer living in New York City. But like gossip columns, Walls doesn’t really talk about herself. Instead, she tells of her father’s drunken rages, her parents’ disinterest in keeping food in the cabinets, and what it’s like to live in an abandoned train depot, sleeping in cardboard boxes rather than beds (all while the parents are perfectly capable of obtaining family money or getting legitimate jobs). I skimmed the parts about their move to West Virginia where they lived with even kookier grandparents and a perverse uncle. Walls doggedly describes the minutiae of her family’s rocky existence, but after a hundred pages, I became tired of gaping at the Walls family. I just felt impatient for some substance.

Walls’ memoir would be a lot more interesting if it was actually a memoir about herself. At least half the book could be devoted to how a child deals with the mental trauma and memories of an unstable childhood. How does it feel for Walls to go shopping in a grocery store, to cook dinner and eat it regularly? Does she hold onto any of her parents’ philosophies about life? What effect does it have on one’s psyche to lie to close friends and lovers about your upbringing? And more interestingly, does Walls want to have kids, or did her parents’ neglect turn her off from that possibility altogether? Is she angry? Walls touches on some of these questions, but does not seriously delve into any. If anything, maybe the memoir’s release is a little premature in Walls’ journey toward resolution about all of this, because The Glass Castle, while glowing with potential, is really only a superficial treatise about a family run by people with serious psychological problems, and not about the healing that most adults seek when coming to grips with an unhappy childhood.

Ann Patchett’s Run

I love Ann Patchett. She’s one of my favorite writers. When I heard she was coming out with a new novel back in September, I emailed friends. I put it on my birthday wishlist. And I read it after two others that felt like grudging work–Songs Without Words (see review below) and The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. (I considered writing something lengthy about Fortress, but my impression is that Jonathan Lethem has a lot of mirrors in his house with which to gaze upon himself approvingly, and does not also deserve the strenuous pitter-patter of my fingers on the keyboard.) So a return to Patchett’s writing was refreshing. Bel Canto, her last novel, could be my favorite ever, if it’s possible to pin one down, which it probably isn’t. Every sentence seemed to communicate the beauty that all art aspires to, which left me inspired.

Therefore, the opening paragraphs of Run felt familiar to me. Run is definitely not Bel Canto, nor should it be. I enjoyed reading it, absorbing the gentle caress Patchett seems to give every character through vivid description, the way every sentence and paragraph seems packed on top of the other in what becomes deceptively elaborate architecture. The first chapter, which is the topic of most interviews Patchett gives about the book, is a beautiful story about a statue’s history that both makes an angel of the main characters’ mother as well as communicates the dynamics of families past and present.

I liked Run, but if I had to explain why I didn’t love it, or why it hasn’t stayed with me in the way that other novels do, I would say that it is too much about ideas. The amusing quirk of Teddy, younger brother to Tip, is that he recites political speeches from memory. And Doyle, their father, dreams of his sons having a major role in politics. But despite this, it’s not didactic enough to be a political novel, even though Patchett has said in interviews that she’s attempted a fictional response to the conservative ideology of traditional family values. Perhaps her message is that families are families whether they are blood-related or not. But can this simple question be addressed appropriately when her characters are two black boys adopted by the rich white Catholic mayor of Boston? What does this mean about race in America, the reader may wonder. Is Patchett making a comment? If not, shouldn’t she?

These are questions that may or may not be layered into the text, depending on your interpretation. It may be why the novel doesn’t have the same resonance as her previous ones, too. After all, Patchett is not really a political writer; she’s a writer of human beauty, of family and poetry. Still, plenty of this exists in Run, and it’s easy to see why Patchett is one of America’s most talented and insightful writers.

Ann Packer’s Songs Without Words

I just finished reading Packer’s latest novel, a novel I couldn’t wait to get my hands on from the time I saw it in Borders until I bought it for myself for my birthday. I enjoyed The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, her first novel, and recommended it to every woman I knew who either liked or did not like to read. The topic was too interesting to pass up–a young woman decides whether she will continue her relationship (engagement, marriage) with her fiancee who has become a paraplegic. This is the kind of question we always ask ourselves, but few writers have the courage to answer. (With the exception of D.H. Lawrence, back in the early 20th century. But Lady Chatterley’s Lover is another story altogether.)

So I’ll just get right to the point about Songs Without Words; it aggravated me. It felt a little like a waste of time. While I noticed Packer’s style had a unique quality of “niceness” in The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, I was so excited by the settings and the contemporary bildungsroman that I ate it up. But the flaws, if you can call them that, seemed to be a little more shiny in her second novel. If I had to find an adjective to describe the writing, I think I would call it Midwestern. There’s a sweetness, a tangy cuteness, to the descriptions and especially dialogue. Sure, she throws in some sex talk and some curse words, but she just can’t cover up the whole doily feel of the thing.

To give her some credit, though, I think Packer’s writing has the potential to be a lot smarter. While I cringed a little at the hokey conversations between the main character, Liz, and her husband, Brody (eck), or the cutesy jokes Liz and her best friend Sarabeth (double eck) make with each other, I noticed that every once in a while, Packer made a really astute observation about friendship, marriage, or parenthood. Early on, Liz, a stay-at-home mom of teenagers, worries that she is not setting the right model for her son when she jumps too quickly to get her husband another piece of toast. But then she justifies it by telling herself that she likes to do things for him. This is the kind of inner debate that modern women deal with all the time, and Packer layers them into the story nicely.

Still, I couldn’t figure out why the role of women in the household and in society wasn’t more of a conflict in the story, and the only reason I could determine is that Packer and her publisher want to sell books. Sure, a writer should be able to write a novel about a generally happy, upper-middle class family with minimal problems. Perhaps too often readers look for a novel to display the harsh, brutal reality of life, or the moral that being wealthy, pretty and thin isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But in all honesty, since Packer’s readers are moms—moms who have enough time in their schedules to enjoy a book club once a month, and for whom Packer’s second novel is a bit of a celebration—she neatly avoids a further exploration of the emotional consequences an upper-middle class stay-at-home mom endures when all of her attention is focused on family.

Now, those who have read the book would think I missed the whole point. The whole book, they might say, is about just such a consequence. Liz’s teenage daughter is extremely depressed and Liz barely notices before more trauma occurs. Yet the portrayal of Liz is too soft and sympathetic; in Packer’s world, there is too little judgment incurred. While Liz and her husband deal with a brief stint of anger and resentment over their daughter’s illness, their arguments are too…Midwestern? No one really yells, no impassioned, biting comments are made. Not once does Brody tell Liz, even though it may or may not be subtly implied, that if her job is to be a mom, then maybe she should have dealt a little better with their daughter’s problem. I mean, seriously. Liz’s kids are teenagers. She’s home. If all she has to do is be a mom, she surely should have noticed her daughter’s depression. Maybe she was spending too much time cooking delicious dinners, dabbling in arts and crafts, and attending yoga classes.

Yet I think Packer would disagree with me. She may say that she is exploring the issue of women’s roles in contemporary society. But there are too few references of Liz having such unique privileges, and there’s too much lacking in dialogue or conflict to exhibit a proper tone to the story. I couldn’t help feeling encouraged to root for Liz, to see parts of myself in her. But I didn’t want to. I just couldn’t figure out why no one was angry that Liz didn’t do anything of value for the six hours her kids were in school. And I kept reading the novel with the expectation that this element would kick in, finally. I still ended up disappointed. As far as I could tell, there were only three moments where Packer highlights Liz’s too-comfy situation. When we’re first getting to know Liz, we’re told that Liz knew even at Stanford that she didn’t want a career, that she only ever wanted to be a mom. The next is an event at school that she attends with her daughter in which the topic is “where women are today”; when asked what the biggest problem plaguing society is, Liz responds “Caring. That there isn’t enough.” The other moms apparently agree.

This is a Stanford educated woman? Maybe she should spend some time reading the newspapers during that huge break she has from mothering each day.

The last is when she tells her husband that maybe she should have gone back to work when her youngest started school. Brody’s indifferent; he just wants to have sex. They do, often. During the rest of the time, Liz does dishes, cooks nice breakfasts and dinners, paints a bench, and visits a Thai restaurant with her friend, Sarabeth.

Sarabeth and Liz’s relationship is another element of the novel that felt empty. This is supposed to be the subplot, another potential conflict that could interestingly address the way relationships between women friends grow and change and often, end, for a variety of reasons. Yet Packer’s lack of understanding about people’s darker sides makes this cursory exploration feel untrue as well. Sarabeth grows up in a house with a depressed mother and ends up moving in with Liz as a teenager. Liz has the happy home as a child, and later, the happy home as an adult, with no social obligations, as is unnervingly apparent. Meanwhile, Sarabeth goes from married man to married man, has difficulty paying the bills, and is overall, very lonely. It is conceivable that she looks to Liz as a panacea, the person who can give her solace amidst all the drudgery. But surely, there has to be a little jealousy here. Women get jealous of each other, especially when one has everything the other doesn’t. If the book jacket describes Packer as “a gifted chronicler of the interior lives of women,” then she surely has missed some chronicling in her second novel.

It is clear that Packer is aware of all these issues, but made the decision to avoid being a critic of her characters. Instead, she wants to love them, to accept them. Maybe she has been doing a lot of yoga. Or maybe she (or her publisher) is being spineless in her craft as a way to sell more books. I could be wrong, but I believe great literature has to have some sort of political resonance. If Packer wants to regain her literary dignity, she’ll need to unleash some harsher truths, or start writing children’s books.

Establishing Peace in the Mommy Wars

I recently immersed myself in a copy of Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families, edited by Leslie Morgan-Steiner. In this collection of essays, women write about the difficult and complex range of emotions and events that lead to their decisions to stay home or work once they have kids.

I read this book while my son, Ben, was napping, or while I was feeding him, or before bed. I kept expecting I would want to escape the mom world for a little while when I had a break from taking care of Ben, but I enjoyed reading this book so much because it made me feel connected to other women like me. Most of them consider themselves feminists; most enjoy(ed) their work; most talked about sleepless nights and nursing their children. A lot of my own thoughts and feelings were reflected in the essays, and that has made the sometimes difficult days at home a little easier.

Despite my adoration, however, there was one huge issue I couldn’t get over. All of the women, with the exception of maybe one or two, are writers, editors, and freelancers. This seemed inordinately unfair to me. Writing is probably the one occupation that has the most flexibility. You can do it in the middle of the night, while the baby is sleeping, on weekends; you can do it in your bedroom, your bathroom, at your mother’s house, while the baby is in the swing. While I appreciated how articulate the essays were, and realize my enjoyment probably had a lot to do with each contributor’s talent, I couldn’t get over what seemed to me a huge deception. Perhaps the title should be Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms IN THE FIELD OF JOURNALISM Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families. Each essay also begins with a long bio of the author, listing the companies and/or publications for which she’s worked, so that each woman seems ambitious and successful, whether she stays at home or not. Most women have wealthy husbands, too, but I guess one must if she faces the choice of staying at home full time.

The topic of moms working or staying home has plagued me since I was a teenager. Growing up in a mostly single-parent household, I always expected to work. I remember hearing arguments and angry interrogations about how money was being spent, and I decided I never wanted to lose the power that comes with pulling your own financial weight. I also liked it when my mother worked; I imagined her being important and efficient, the kind of worker who everyone admires and depends on. I much preferred the image of her in a fast-paced office than mopping the floor or dusting the tables while my brother rolled across the floor.

Any woman who wants to have kids considers how she’s going to make career and family work: she either works full-time after a brief stint at home (usually 6 weeks to 3 months, if she’s fortunate to have maternity leave); she works part-time, or she stays home indefinitely, until her children don’t “need” her anymore. She thinks about this in a way her husband does not. There is usually no question about what a man will do once the baby is born: he will work. The woman, on the other hand, struggles with guilt either way, especially if she enjoys her job. Ever since Linda Hirshman published her subversive article, “Homeward Bound,” in a 2005 edition of American Prospect, about intelligent, promising young women opting out of the work force, I have thought more intensely about how women’s individual choices make a big impact in the larger political body. Hirshman follows ambitious women from Ivy League universities for a few years after they’re married and discovers that many of these women choose to stay home once they have children. She critiques feminism’s use of the word “choice” and claims that women within these milieu do not really have the choice they think they have; rather, the glass ceiling we heard so much about in the 70’s and 80’s now exists in the home. Instead of college-educated women making a difference in their accounting firms, law firms, or even government, they’re raising children and losing their ranks at the prestigious jobs they worked so hard to get. Hirshman wonders why and proposes some solutions that many Americans would scoff at (marry a liberal, have only one child, hire a nanny, but do NOT stay home).

As a teacher at a private girls’ high school, I discussed the article with my students. I always hoped that the young women in a mostly upper-middle-class environment, where 100% go on to college, would have grand plans for their future. Politicians, doctors, lawyers, professors…this was the point of a single-sex education, right? The confidence to set large goals and attain them without the self-consciousness that might plague girls from coed schools. But by and large, the girls I spoke to wanted to be at home with their kids, like their moms. They pictured having jobs–nurses, teachers–but stopping when it was time to make babies. It didn’t help that most of the young female teachers who taught them left once they had a baby, or that the female career-day speakers worked only part-time (despite having teenage children), or touted the importance of being home with kids rather than working (Mary Kay make-up representative included). Yet I had a few students who willingly confessed that they once thought or still don’t think their moms do important work during the day, and watching soaps or going to the gym (their description) seemed very leisurely compared to their stressful schoolwork. One even mentioned that her father’s favorite joke is how little his wife does around the house. After a heated discussion in one class, a student asked excitedly if I thought it was okay for her to be a model first and then a mom. I tried hard to avoid the question, but no doubt she saw my frown. When I took an informal survey during study hall about how girls felt having working moms vs. stay-at-home moms, they didn’t have horror stories either way, but the conclusion they came to was that I shouldn’t worry about my kids because a teacher gets the best of both worlds. The bell rang before I could ask, “What about other women with different careers? What are they supposed to do?”

Here is the inherent problem, I think, with advocating a mommy-at-home society: it will always be a male-centered society. When parents have daughters, those girls will be encouraged to stay at home and raise kids, just as their mothers did, and their mothers before. How does this differ from a Puritan or Victorian ethic, that girls should learn the cooking, sewing, and cleaning, since that’s all they’ll be expected to do? Sure, modern women who stay at home can raise sensitive, caring boys, who may or may not take women’s plight into consideration when they become senators. But why would the young girl who sees how easy it is for her mom to pick her up from piano lessons, drive her to her friends’, or volunteer to make cupcakes, choose a career? Why would she have higher ambitions if the work force isn’t all that important? If her mom’s main interest at the dinner table is her daughter’s latest crush? The only reason for her daughter to be smart then, to do well in school, is so she can travel in a similar circle of intelligent and ambitious men, marry one, and enjoy the pedicures that follow. Oh, and then raise kids who benefit from her college education. The boys are rewarded by going on to Ivy League schools and becoming CEOs, the girls by marrying CEOs and raising their boys to become CEOs. The cycle continues, with a couple of congressmen, judges, and doctors thrown in. Meanwhile, we’re back to the advertisements where Wellesley graduates smile next to ovens, but stick their heads in them when the camera is turned off.

Of course, this discussion centers around high-income households, where the family can afford to live on the father’s salary; most households in America do not have such an advantage. But unfortunately, it is the educated, wealthy class of people who make significant change in public policy. No one becomes president if he (or dare I say, she) doesn’t have the money and status to put him in the running. Sure, this argument about working mothers vs. stay-at-home mothers really only affects part of the population, but the privileged part of society is the part we naturally want to emulate, so the manners and lifestyle inevitably trickle down, at least to a large extent. (Otherwise we wouldn’t see people buying cars and clothes they can’t afford, and no one would call Target Tar-jay.)

The other side of this coin is that it is our society that must change. Momsrising is an organization vying for free child-healthcare and for law-mandated paid maternity leave (rather than this three-month-no-pay crap. As if most Americans can afford a three-month pay cut when they have a child). But how will our society change if no women are on the other side of their picket fences, using their power and leverage to change it?

But do individual choices matter that much within the larger system? Some women will stay home, some women will work. It’s always been this way. Maybe far fewer will work, but they will still be out there. And some women will be totally fulfilled raising their kids full-time. Should they be forced to work if raising their kids is what they’d prefer to do? Of course not. Just like women who love their jobs shouldn’t give them up out of guilt or a sense of responsibility that they must be at home all day with their children.

I always thought that I would work out of financial necessity, and there would be no choice to be made. But the more I thought about it, and the more my belly grew, I decided I wanted to be around for the little guy growing in me, as much for myself as for him. That’s right–a lot of moms don’t admit it, but staying home is as much for them as it is for their kids. Who wants to miss any of their children’s milestones? When I hear Ben coo-ing in the morning or see him grabbing his feet in Happy Baby pose, my heart lurches; he’s so precious, and my instinct is to care for him. I want to keep record of all the little accomplishments he makes, the different smiles, the way I can calm him down when he fusses (which changes from week to week), because before I know it, he’ll be moving out of the house. Also, to say that I could never be home with kids–it’s too boring–is suggesting that he’s somewhat of a burden in my life, or that I’m too good for it. But he’s a part of my life that makes it richer–not the only part, but a large one, just as my husband, friends, family, or fulfilling work are. Maybe women stay at home not out of a sense of obligation, but because they love their children, which biologically make sense–our bodies are made to carry them and feed them, why not raise them, too?

Over a much-needed dinner out, where I expressed these and other concerns, a close friend made it simple: different people have different jobs and roles in life. Some have a purpose to take care of kids. Some teach. Some manage huge banks. That’s it.

What I’ve been considering a society-wide problem could possibly be just my own confusion over which direction to choose. There is no right answer. So I’m going to see where life takes me. I’ll teach part time for a pittance, but money was never my biggest concern. I want to be important to my family and to others; I want to help people think in new ways, inspire them, have interesting discussions that make us better people.

And in the meantime, I will be thankful to those whose job it is to make baby swings, so I can go to the bathroom during the day, or check my email, or write this essay.

Parenting Books: Evaluating the Different Philosophies

Now that I’m a parent of a three-month old, I am getting quite an education on different styles of parenting. It starts with the nurses in the hospital, who in my case, kept offering to give my son a formula bottle so I could sleep after my C-section. “No way,” was my horrified response, because I had already been told by lactation consultants that bottles cause nipple confusion in newborn infants, which would result in my newborn never latching onto the breast. Next, the nice but somewhat militaristic pediatrician informed us that a newborn has fat reserves to be healthy without much food for up to four days, and no one should offer bottles. I realize now, however, that many new mothers take the opportunity to enjoy undisturbed sleep while a nurse feeds their baby with little, if any, ramifications.

Doctors and nurses aren’t the only ones with opinions, though. Family and friends chip in with passionate child-rearing wisdom of their own. Pacifier, no pacifier. Huggies or cloth diapers. Blankets or no blankets. Bathe every day or only twice a week. Let him cry or don’t. No one seems to tell you when you have the baby that there are, in fact, varying styles of baby or child-rearing, and parents have to decide what works best for them. Instead, new parents become overwhelmed, their insecurities exacerbated. Some authors (usually doctors, when it comes to parenting books) seem to desire this effect in their reader, and cause what I term reader-dependence. Others assume a level of at least a high school education and common sense in their readers, empowering them to make decisions.

When I was in the hospital, I devoured a borrowed copy of The Breastfeeding Book, written by William and Martha Sears. In my vulnerable new-mom state, I wanted to get my hands on as much information as possible. While the focus is on the myriad advantages of breastfeeding for both mom and baby (or toddler, as the Sears family would have it), their philosophy of attachment parenting abounds from many a chapter. (If a reader is hurting for more advice and information, thirteen titles in the Sears library are conveniently suggested on the back cover.) For instance, the Searses believe that the purpose of breastfeeding spans nutrition for a baby to discipline for a toddler. It’s acceptable, in their view, to breastfeed a child until she or he is four. Not to mention that the child should share mom and dad’s bed until he is one or older so that he knows he is loved and cared for. (It’s perfectly understandable if child wakes up several times a night to eat from mom, too.) Parents should carry their babies in a sling and prevent crying altogether. While breastfeeding (which you can probably safely stop without the child feeling abandoned by the time he enters middle school), a mother should avoid giving her child bottles or having other members of the family enjoy feeding the baby. That’s solely the realm of the mother, just as waking for night feedings can only be accommodated by mom.

I’m scared to hear what the Searses have to say in The Discipline Book, so I think I’ll keep my blood-pressure low and avoid that section of the bookstore.

I have many concerns about this parenting philosophy. The first is that it assumes parents should have no other pleasures or obligations aside from meeting their child’s every need before the child even knows she has it. The child is the center of attention in the house, and adults’ needs or desires always come second. Having also read bits of The Birth Book, where the Searses fearmonger about the C-section rate and the problems of pain-medication, I recognize that these theories about birthing and parenting only serve to subjugate the mother. The couple is a little passive-agressive, so their subtle messages are at first easy to miss. In my ninth month of pregnancy, anxious about the oncoming labor, I spent an afternoon reading bits of The Birth Book. Then I felt sick at my decision to receive pain medication, because it would indicate that I did not intend to fulfill my natural role. I also began to distrust all doctors, who were really Hyde-like evil butchers rubbing their hands maniacally in the scrub room, eager to cut open women’s stomachs. But as far as parenting after delivery goes, the Searses’ philosophy isn’t great for the father, either, who never gets his wife to himself. A mother who never gets a break from feeding her child, sleeping with her child, or carrying her child is sure to feel weary and exhausted, unless she has a somewhat Freudian obsession with having her nipple sucked. But in Sears World, moms are only too happy to serve, sacrifice, and serve some more. In Real World, moms are probably better moms when they get a break or a full night’s sleep once in a while. (And I can’t help but mention the danger of co-sleeping that Dr. Sears touts as the optimal sleeping arrangement, and which most pediatricians would advise against.)

On the other side of the parenting turf war are Gary Ezzo and Robert Bucknam. Apparently there has been a lot of controversy about their book On Becoming Baby Wise, where the authors criticize attachment parenting and suggest letting a baby cry before going to sleep. This book cites The American Academy of Pediatrics as well as the groundbeaking guide for children’s sleep, Dr. Marc Weissbluth’s Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. Apparently, it is widely recognized that some children will cry a little upon going to sleep, because they’re tired but do not want to miss out on the fun of hanging out with their parents. But since quiet, undisturbed sleep is so important to a developing brain, Ezzo and Bucknam suggest putting the baby on a schedule of feeding and sleeping. Ezzo’s philosophy is that a child is part of a family, not its center, and so he or she should get used to delaying gratification and developing independence. Ezzo points out that if a mother always nurses her baby to sleep, the baby can never sleep without his mother present. Similarly, if the mother feeds the baby without discerning whether the child is actually hungry, the mother and her breasts are the sole source of comfort, rather than other members of the family. This inhibits the mother from taking a break, or sleeping, or spending time enjoying her husband’s company, which is a priority for Ezzo, since a happy marriage is the solid foundation for happy children.

Ezzo’s writing tactics are different from Sears’, and this is why I think there is so much division among parents. Ezzo likes the idea of a schedule or routine; he thinks the baby benefits from knowing what to expect as well as the parent (or to be specific, the mother, who in this book seems to be home). This makes a mother’s job a smidge easier; she can plan her day and manage her household, rather than be managed by a needy infant. Ezzo asserts that this kind of parenting solves the growing problem of what he calls “me-ism,” a child’s belief that he or she is the center of the universe and everyone will work to accommodate him or her. But most importantly, Ezzo assumes the parent reading his book has some intelligence. He advocates being flexible. While a parent may have the child on a feeding schedule of every three hours, the child should be fed if hungry a little earlier than that. The parent must assess the situation, and he assumes parents are capable of doing that. Sears, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to trust the parent to assess; if the parent assesses wrong or lets a child cry too long, the child will suffer irrevocable emotional damage which we can not yet quantify, but which will surely be there. To Sears, parents are reactionary figures; to Ezzo, parents are the leaders of their household.

In the world of parenting literature, it’s important to realize that no one book has all the answers. Parents read these books because they love their children and want what’s best, but in the information age, it’s almost impossible to figure out which information is helpful and which is just plain bad. This means that sane parents are the savvy ones, those who trust themselves to make wise decisions. The parenting books worth reading, then, are the ones that encourage their readers to think, assess, and recognize the methods that work best for their particular households. In my house, I’m absorbing the information I learned about sleep from Weissbluth, enacting a little bit of Ezzo, throwing Sears out the door, and trying to ignore parenting websites and magazines. They only serve to make me obsessive and want to buy things.

Memories Not Worth Keeping

If you’ve read the too few entries on my blog, you’ll note that I mentioned back in June, 2006 that our book club had chosen The Memory Keeper’s Daughter as our next book. I need to write to explain that it was a bad choice (a learning experience) and that if you’re a person interested in good literature instead of fluffy (crap) literature, of which there is too much, you should not waste your time on this book, even though it was on the New York Times Bestsellers list for weeks (and weeks).

The story is about a doctor, David, who has the good fortune to deliver his own babies, only to discover, while his wife is passed out, that one of the children has Down Syndrome. Reacting impulsively, he asks the nurse, Caroline, to take the girl baby to a special home/hospital. He tells his wife, Norah, that the second baby dies. Norah goes through much of her life wondering about her second child, and feeling that something just isn’t right, like she perpetually can’t find her keys, or something. Their son, Paul, grows up seeing the disconnection between his parents, since this huge lie has transported them from a loving young couple to two strangers who live together. David takes up the hobby of photography (memory-keeping, I suppose), and Norah becomes invested with work and her male coworkers.

Meanwhile, Caroline, the nurse, has wrestled with her moral rectitude and kept the girl baby, who she names Phoebe. She meets a man and finally loses her long-time crush on Dr. David, especially when she sees how empty he has become.

The problem with this book, and books like it, is in its repulsive sentimentality. The reason this novel looked so interesting to me was because it was tackling a very serious and silent issue–parents’ feelings, misgivings, confusion over having children who are not what they expected. But the character who makes the decision to give up his daughter does it within the first 50 pages of the novel, and there’s too little attention paid to this notion in general. Why do parents abandon their children? Is there a difference between the attachment between fathers and children vs. mothers and children? How do parents adjust to finding out their baby has a disease they didn’t expect? These are questions that Kim Edwards chooses not to tackle, perhaps because she is too unskilled a writer, or, more likely, because she is targeting an audience who would balk at such an honest exploration. The book suffers for it. Don’t get me wrong–Edwards’ creates some nice turns of phrase, some vivid imagery, but I can’t help feel that her depiction of Caroline, the angel nurse, and her maternal relationship with adopted daughter Phoebe, is no different than a woman’s relationship with a sweet little puppy.

Further, the book goes on too long. Paul is 19 by the end of the book, too many life cycles have passed, and Edwards’ story is less about David’s impulsive decision and more about portraying a dysfunctional marriage alongside the emotional fulfillment of a single mother (which also seems a little too easy for Caroline). The characters are predictable and cliche; Edwards may as well list their names and personality attributes in the first chapter, since the characters develop so little. She tries to rock the boat by making us feel a little something for David by the end, rather than writing him off as a villain, but her attempt to explain his motives are faulty and unrealistic. The characters are never fully realized, even though that seems to be Edwards’ major goal.