brain dump
I should be doing math homework. Today we talked about sine and cosine and how to find the length of an arc, t, on the unit circle. It involves Trig, and I actually kind of get it without pounding it into my brain, a first for me in Pre-Calc.
I have a Chemistry test tomorrow that I should be doing the practice test for, as well. I have spent close to 15 hours in the last 2 days focusing solely on Chemistry, sprinting to gain ground on the race I lost when I got Strep for a week and spent over 4 days in a serious fever haze, unable to comprehend how to get to the bathroom or feed myself, much less cancel out equations to find heat of reaction in a system of reactions using Hess'es Law.
But I haven't had the house to myself or this much quiet time to think and write in months. I should be doing something else but I can't concentrate on something else, and instead I am going to let my brain run rampant while I rant. When all of this thought and writing is done pouring out of me, maybe I'll be empty enough to make room for all the Chem and Math I should be doing. So this is gonna be long and mostly introspective and highly disorganized. Feel free to stop reading.
Today I have cramps. For the first time in almost 6 years, I have cramps. I'm sure that by now you think this may be a rant about periods or something, but I assure you, it's not the point. Also, I do not care because this is what I feel like writing about, and I haven't written for myself in so long that if there is writing in there, I'm gonna word vomit it out. So, there is about to be more information than I'm sure you need about my reproductive system and choices, and if you don't want to read about it, I'll encase it in a line of asterisks so you know when you're past it, like closing your eyes after the scary part in a movie.
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So today I have cramps. I haven't had them in so many years that I didn't remember what they were, at first. I have had an IUD since late 2003, which freed me from the burden of constantly remembering every day that I needed to think about birth control. This was a needed thing for me, because when it was my responsibility to remember every day that I needed to think about birth control, I wasn't good at it. I went through so many packs of pills because I forgot to take several in a row, I'm pretty sure I could have put about 3 months of pills together from the discards. So, eventually, it became a necessity to find another way to deal with it that took the daily reminder out of my hands. While this made my life easier in many aspects, I feel like it removed me from a cycle that many women face each month, and the truth behind that cycle. This thing that women go through, this hateful week when we want to eat too much or we feel too weak or we get yeast infections or we feel dirty and unclean or we are merely annoyed because it means we have one more thing to remember to put into our purses.... this thing makes us face an inevitability, a connection with all other females no matter how we feel about them, personally. We all deal with our roles in reproduction, somehow. Look around you on a bus, at the supermarket, at a coffee shop, driving down the road. Notice, really NOTICE, how many other women you pass. Now look at them and remember that at one point or another, almost all of them have also shoved quarters into a huge white box on the wall in a public restroom because they were surprised or forgot or just ran out of whatever they use to keep themselves clean and socially acceptable during their period.
So, I haven't had to deal with this thing in years. No cramps, no bleeding, no obvious reasons for emotional swings on a cycle, no standing in front of that white box and cursing because I don't have quarters but I also don't have a spare pair of pants. Today, sitting in class, I was trying to figure out why I was so uncomfortable, why my insides felt pressure and pain, why my bag seemed so much heavier and my back hurt so badly I was having a hard time straightening when I stood. It didn't even occur to me. I literally thought I had maybe misjudged the sprouts I put on my bagel sandwich when I made it this morning, and had to take a guess as to whether they were still good enough to eat or needed to be trashed. I ran to the bathroom after Chem class, convinced I had eaten something horrid or that this was a side effect of the antibiotics I am still taking to make sure the Strep is gone. It hit me right when I got there, like a big stupid facepalm. “OOOOOHHHH, duh. I know what this is.” I didn't have quarters to put into the big white box on the wall. I shrugged, figuring I was leaving campus soon, anyway. By the time I got Downtown, I was in so much pain that the walk from the bus station to the shop was excruciating. I looked for Ibuprofen there, but couldn't find it easily, so I made a joke about it and didn't let my pain show until John and I were walking to the car. I hurt so badly that I made him drive home while I curled into a ball in the passenger seat.
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So, when I got home, I found some Ibuprofen and took it, curled up in the comfy chair, while I tried to get my mind ready for Math. Instead, what I was able to focus on was my body, was how much I hurt, was how I can't believe I have distanced myself so much from this Biological truth that I am kind of ashamed at what a baby I'm being. I picked up a book full of essays written by women, about growing up working class in America, using the time to center, to think about how I am connected to other women, to read that other women deal with this every day and they still have time to write and to fight for their right to be heard and to find their places in the world.
This book makes me angry. Before you get all upset, let me tell you why. It makes me angry in the way that it makes me uncomfortable, which is a way that is difficult to define. I first picked it up this summer when I borrowed it from a friend on the way to the lake, something to read while I floated on the water in the sunshine, in the raft that I bought as a luxury item, wearing my $2 flip flops and drinking my $1.69 bottle of water and eating my $8 deli snack with kalamata olives and goat cheese in it.
Let me tell you what first strikes me about this picture, and then maybe you will see why some parts of this book irritate me and some downright infuriate me.
First, here I am, reading it in the time I have stolen from my busy life, time that I claimed as mine because my routine is stressful and I need time to myself to feel like I still have a life. What is the life I need so much time away from? I'm white, and over 30, with no children. I am getting a college education at a good University. I own my own business, which is successful and was basically given to me in a steal of a deal, by the people who actually suffered for years to make it successful. I have a good place to live that I have money to pay for. I have several pets, which I have the means to take care of when they need it and are treated very well. I have a husband who loves me, who works through our problems with me, respects both me and my endeavors, and supports me however he is able to, even if it's not in the way that I would like. I have the luxury of paying more for food that is lower in fat and fresher than most of the cheap and/or prepackaged food I grew up accustomed to. I even have the luxury to choose to eat less because I am concerned about my weight and health. I have friends who love me, and are concerned about my well being, who contact me regularly and tell me they are worried about my stress level and urge me to take time, just like the time I am taking at that moment, reading this book.
In this place, in the sunshine, in my privileged white average life, I pick the book up expecting it to be filled with story after story about women who grew up in crime ridden, drug filled neighborhoods, who literally had no food or shelter or parents or people who would help them care for themselves. I expect from the forward that this will be a book written by women who endured things like these and have found a way to have their voices heard, to be part of the conversation about things like class and race and not just be the subject of the conversation. I want to read it partly because I want to see how they view their connection to other women, and if growing up as they did, without the benefits I had, made them feel more or less connected than I do to other women around me, wonder if it gave them a sense of community or togetherness.
The author of the forward, the editor who put the collection together, rants about Barbara Ehrenreich's “Nickel And Dimed” because she hates the book. This is a thing I can get behind, also finding that book to be infuriating. The editor denounces “Nickel And Dimed” as a sham written by an upper class scholar who writes the obvious. The point of Ehrenrich's novel was that working class people are exactly that: working class, which is to say that they work very hard, often times doing demanding physical labor or jobs that the upper class would find demeaning, like cleaning houses or janitorial work, and that for this labor they are not paid enough to survive or support families or improve their financial circumstances. The book is horribly condescending because it is ABOUT the circumstance of millions of Americans who live like this, and yet does not allow those Americans to be part of a conversation about why they are there. There is no room in this book for Ehrenreich to speak to and with the people she writes about as if they are all equal in their humanity. It is written like a sociological study about a culture in another country, far removed from the writer, and the intended audience is other people like her, who cannot comprehend working a retail job stocking the shelves at Wal-Mart at night for minimum wage because having a day time job would mean paying for child care, which negates a paycheck like a high school basic algebra equation. Ehrenreich's book basically states that the humanity or worth of the working poor is somehow less than the humanity or worth of the wealthy, even while purporting to tear down those ideas.
Anyway, we both hate that book, the editor and I, and I figure that this collection is going to have somewhat the same feel as our shared rant, with the theme that women who grow up in these families often have a much different experience during childhood and adolecense then their male counterparts, and on into adulthood. The theme I am hoping to glean is that these women share a common bond with all women, that the experience of being female is somewhat the same, no matter what class you were raised, and that truths like connectedness and an ideal of a shared experience of some form of patriarchal opression can be overcome. So, I start reading it, in my privilege, out on a small mountain lake in the full sun of summer, ready for some conversations with smart women I know, about feminism and equality. I am ready to read experiences of a life I could never understand, not having experienced it, but wanting to know how people who did experience it, see it.
And I find some of that in this book. I do find some stories in this book about women who literally grew up with nothing and still found a voice, found not just words to speak about it but words to powerfully speak about it, to tell people like me who did not have to experience such a dearth of basic needs what it was like and alert us to the presence of these things in our own communities, in our own neighborhoods and towns. There is a story from a woman who managed to get loans to get to college, who describes being poor as a taste, who grew up with a crazy junkie mother and often chewed paper to try to make herself feel full. There are terrible stories about rural girls living with abusive fathers or stepfathers, and mothers who could/would not help them get away from constant sexual and physical abuse due to absolute lack of resources. There is a story written by a woman with immigrant parents who didn't speak any English, and who often were not able to provide food, about how she had to miss so much school to translate for her parents through bureaucratic red tape that she almost never graduated.
However, (and here is where I start telling you why I find this book to be so self indulgent, so hatefully ironically like “Nickel And Dimed” that I want to scream and throw it) most of what I read are masturbatory solliliqies written by women who think themselves separate from some imagined “middle class” who are smack dab in the middle of it. There is a woman who also writes about having immigrant parents, and the reader is supposed to think her life was difficult. Her story, the entirety of it, is basically that her life was boring. Seriously. Her parents were factory workers, who had steady paychecks. They worked, and worked hard. Her essay is about the kind of food she ate, and about what dinner was like in her household. She states there was always enough, but it was boring. The woman talks about how she first discovered different kinds of cuisine in college. AT SMITH. Seriously. The goddamn woman went to a prestigious and aggregiously expensive college, she talks about her semester abroad in Chile. This woman is supposed to speak for the “working class” experience? Fuck that.
Another essay is from a woman who laments her own definition of being “poor” as being “emotionally empty” because her mother passed on her longing for better “things” to her children. Her parents owned a two family home. They always had enough to eat and clothes to wear. Her essay starts out by saying that they didn't buy “brand name” food, like Jif peanut butter, or like real butter, or like Kool Aid. What the shit. Seriously?
One of the essays is written by a woman who identifies as a “femme” and her rant is about “feminists” trying to classify her or make her feel dirty because she chooses to wear suggestive clothing in bright colors and heavy makeup, and she somehow links her choice to dress/act this way back to her Midwest family of women who “showed their own brand of resistance” to “being treated like herd animals and reclaiming their sexuality” by dressing in things that “upper class feminists” would classify as “trashy” or “dirty”. Seriously?
The one that makes me the most irate is an essay written by a young, gay, white woman in San Francisco who loses her job and becomes unemployed for a while. She feels outcast by the lesbian “community” in San Fran, who she states are not really a community, but a big incestuous group that struggles just to keep everyone in it conforming. Her dad is a teacher at Community College, and a writer. She is angry because when she loses her job she becomes scared she can't pay her rent and she is angry at her friends' sense of entitlement. Her point is that she finds a sense of exhilaration when she “realizes” that not having a safety net makes you “closer to life” and gives you a sense of being “free”. I wanted to reach through the page and smack her.
I do not find a commonality with these women, and it makes me feel cheated. I resent them and their whining about being “working class” when they don't seem to know what it means any more than Erienreich does. I am almost ashamed that other women, women I know, are reading the things these women wrote, and identifying with them, and then thinking of themselves as disadvantaged, as if they have something to fight against in their... what... their attendance at Smith? The luxury of living in a house your family owns and knowing there will be food on the table, no matter how “boring” you find it to be? With the love of a good mother who provides for you and a wide family network that will catch you if you fall, and a web of friends that you don't respect and end up destroying in your own conceited sense of self indulgenge? It makes me angry because I feel like I grew up lucky, and I had less than these women did.
I was lucky. I don't find it demeaning at all that we ate margarine or that we had off brand Hamburger Helper or that sometimes we ate leftover spaghetti for 4 days. My mother worked, always full time. My father is a minister, a job that gives him satisfaction in feeling like he is following his calling, but doesn't bring in enough money to support a family. When I was in high school, my mom took out a horrendous amount of money in student loans and put herself through community college, then the University of Washington's nursing program. She graduated Magna Cum Laud, and was the first person in her family to graduate college, at all. My dad has a master's degree in Theology, also at the expense of untold student loans, that he went to school in California to finish, leaving my mom at home with my sister and I in daycare, while she worked full time.
Another friend of mine said something today while we were eating together that made me pause, and was partially responsible for me coming home and reading this book today. We were talking about a cooking class she took this week with her boyfriend, and about the woman who taught the class. My friend was saying that she wished she had a woman like this in her family, because this woman running the class talked a great deal about food being an expression of love from a woman to her family, and that the teacher expressed the view that if you are going to make a meal to feed your loved ones, you have to “do it right” by making it all fresh, and making it healthy and hearty and really taking time to make the meal carefully crafted. I almost opened my mouth to spit out something nasty about her upbringing being sheltered and that the way she was raised would probably allow time for that. I bit my tongue at the last minute because she often says things like this that really highlight the complete difference in economic situation between us, and I often respond with an unkind remark that makes her feel bad.
The way I grew up, neither of my parents had time to “do it right” by planning and then shopping for a carefully prepared meal. We shopped at Costco. We bought in bulk. My parents had an extra freezer and when we could afford it, we bought an entire car full of basic foodstuffs and froze it so we could grab it later. Our lunches were often full of prepackaged single serving foods, easy for a kid to pack for themselves. We never had name brand, it was always generic or Kroeger or Western Family. My mom had about 5 dishes we would rotate through because we could make a giant batch of it, and eat it for the rest of the week or freeze the rest for the nights that she worked after class and wouldn't have time to serve dinner after a 16 hour day. My sister and I often ate box macaroni and cheese. I don't find this demeaning, or even exceptionally “poor.” I know for a while that we would have qualified for school lunch programs but my mother believed that programs such as those should be left for people with less resources than were available to us. We had years of school shopping where we got underwear, bras, and socks new, and everything else was either a hand me down or thrift shopped. I had years when I didn't have a coat in the winter, because my mother had scraped to buy one and I thoughtlessly lost it on the playground in the middle of fall. My parents are swimming in debt, even now. Neither of them learned how to save or manage money. They will most likely never own their own home.
My friend grew up with parents who owned not just one home, but sold that home and traded up when they decided they needed more room. She and her sister needed expensive surgeries, dozens of them, and her parents not only had the access to the care they needed but the money to pay the doctors. Her mother stayed at home while her father worked. My friend got to play sports in high school, had new clothes whenever she wanted them. She never had a pair of Payless shoes. Her parents paid for her college education and for her to go abroad to Germany. She was taught to save money and to keep a safety net, something she does compulsively now, which affords her the ability to have comfort in knowing she could easily save enough to turn her already generous savings into a down payment for a house. Her parents bought her car for her. She shops at Pier One to relieve stress from her day and buys comforters that cost almost as much as a car payment for me. She has been able to take 6 vacations this year alone, flying back and forth to Ohio a few times, out to Colorado, down to Portland, and out to the coast. I am almost ashamed to admit that I resent her for her level of security even while I acknowledge that her upbringing is responsible for the the affluence she has now. Even while I know that I am not disadvantaged, that I am fortunate when so many around me are not.
How does this all connect? I am struggling to put the abstract into words now that I've gotten this far. I am looking for commonality of experience with other women, and feeling like the tidal hormonal change we all go through should be a thread that lets us transcend labels like “race” and “class”. I am looking for an ideal that says that we can use that commonality to have an honest discussion about our lives and situations, being varied and each having a unique voice. I guess I am also saying that people who are the “haves,” who have basic shelter, food, network, community, family and more than enough means to not just “survive” but to eventually have a hope of “thriving”, that these people should stop whining about how “working class” they are and actually look for a way to find that commonality, while acknowledging the means they were blessed to have. I am hoping that women, especially women like myself with the benefit of the opportunity for higher education, will take some of what is afforded to us by privilege and share some of that benefit with other women who don't have those opportunities, thereby giving another woman a chance to raise herself or her family from a “have not” without basic food, water, shelter, network and community, to a person who can classify herself as not just “surviving” but “thriving.” I am hoping that when I finish my degree, I can find ways to use the Spanish I am learning to help someone else read or write in English, a huge advantage that many immigrant families don't have. I am hoping that I can eventually have time to donate to Big Sisters programs, or before and after school tutoring available to kids from low income families, to help them succeed. I am hoping that when I finally am finished with the education I am fighting to get, I can use my teaching degree to help young women find that voice so that conversations about commonality become easier and they are inspired to share what they have with other women.
Wow, that was long winded. If you are still reading, you deserve some kind of a medal. Or maybe we can have a conversation and you can long windedly tell me what you think, too.
I have a Chemistry test tomorrow that I should be doing the practice test for, as well. I have spent close to 15 hours in the last 2 days focusing solely on Chemistry, sprinting to gain ground on the race I lost when I got Strep for a week and spent over 4 days in a serious fever haze, unable to comprehend how to get to the bathroom or feed myself, much less cancel out equations to find heat of reaction in a system of reactions using Hess'es Law.
But I haven't had the house to myself or this much quiet time to think and write in months. I should be doing something else but I can't concentrate on something else, and instead I am going to let my brain run rampant while I rant. When all of this thought and writing is done pouring out of me, maybe I'll be empty enough to make room for all the Chem and Math I should be doing. So this is gonna be long and mostly introspective and highly disorganized. Feel free to stop reading.
Today I have cramps. For the first time in almost 6 years, I have cramps. I'm sure that by now you think this may be a rant about periods or something, but I assure you, it's not the point. Also, I do not care because this is what I feel like writing about, and I haven't written for myself in so long that if there is writing in there, I'm gonna word vomit it out. So, there is about to be more information than I'm sure you need about my reproductive system and choices, and if you don't want to read about it, I'll encase it in a line of asterisks so you know when you're past it, like closing your eyes after the scary part in a movie.
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So today I have cramps. I haven't had them in so many years that I didn't remember what they were, at first. I have had an IUD since late 2003, which freed me from the burden of constantly remembering every day that I needed to think about birth control. This was a needed thing for me, because when it was my responsibility to remember every day that I needed to think about birth control, I wasn't good at it. I went through so many packs of pills because I forgot to take several in a row, I'm pretty sure I could have put about 3 months of pills together from the discards. So, eventually, it became a necessity to find another way to deal with it that took the daily reminder out of my hands. While this made my life easier in many aspects, I feel like it removed me from a cycle that many women face each month, and the truth behind that cycle. This thing that women go through, this hateful week when we want to eat too much or we feel too weak or we get yeast infections or we feel dirty and unclean or we are merely annoyed because it means we have one more thing to remember to put into our purses.... this thing makes us face an inevitability, a connection with all other females no matter how we feel about them, personally. We all deal with our roles in reproduction, somehow. Look around you on a bus, at the supermarket, at a coffee shop, driving down the road. Notice, really NOTICE, how many other women you pass. Now look at them and remember that at one point or another, almost all of them have also shoved quarters into a huge white box on the wall in a public restroom because they were surprised or forgot or just ran out of whatever they use to keep themselves clean and socially acceptable during their period.
So, I haven't had to deal with this thing in years. No cramps, no bleeding, no obvious reasons for emotional swings on a cycle, no standing in front of that white box and cursing because I don't have quarters but I also don't have a spare pair of pants. Today, sitting in class, I was trying to figure out why I was so uncomfortable, why my insides felt pressure and pain, why my bag seemed so much heavier and my back hurt so badly I was having a hard time straightening when I stood. It didn't even occur to me. I literally thought I had maybe misjudged the sprouts I put on my bagel sandwich when I made it this morning, and had to take a guess as to whether they were still good enough to eat or needed to be trashed. I ran to the bathroom after Chem class, convinced I had eaten something horrid or that this was a side effect of the antibiotics I am still taking to make sure the Strep is gone. It hit me right when I got there, like a big stupid facepalm. “OOOOOHHHH, duh. I know what this is.” I didn't have quarters to put into the big white box on the wall. I shrugged, figuring I was leaving campus soon, anyway. By the time I got Downtown, I was in so much pain that the walk from the bus station to the shop was excruciating. I looked for Ibuprofen there, but couldn't find it easily, so I made a joke about it and didn't let my pain show until John and I were walking to the car. I hurt so badly that I made him drive home while I curled into a ball in the passenger seat.
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So, when I got home, I found some Ibuprofen and took it, curled up in the comfy chair, while I tried to get my mind ready for Math. Instead, what I was able to focus on was my body, was how much I hurt, was how I can't believe I have distanced myself so much from this Biological truth that I am kind of ashamed at what a baby I'm being. I picked up a book full of essays written by women, about growing up working class in America, using the time to center, to think about how I am connected to other women, to read that other women deal with this every day and they still have time to write and to fight for their right to be heard and to find their places in the world.
This book makes me angry. Before you get all upset, let me tell you why. It makes me angry in the way that it makes me uncomfortable, which is a way that is difficult to define. I first picked it up this summer when I borrowed it from a friend on the way to the lake, something to read while I floated on the water in the sunshine, in the raft that I bought as a luxury item, wearing my $2 flip flops and drinking my $1.69 bottle of water and eating my $8 deli snack with kalamata olives and goat cheese in it.
Let me tell you what first strikes me about this picture, and then maybe you will see why some parts of this book irritate me and some downright infuriate me.
First, here I am, reading it in the time I have stolen from my busy life, time that I claimed as mine because my routine is stressful and I need time to myself to feel like I still have a life. What is the life I need so much time away from? I'm white, and over 30, with no children. I am getting a college education at a good University. I own my own business, which is successful and was basically given to me in a steal of a deal, by the people who actually suffered for years to make it successful. I have a good place to live that I have money to pay for. I have several pets, which I have the means to take care of when they need it and are treated very well. I have a husband who loves me, who works through our problems with me, respects both me and my endeavors, and supports me however he is able to, even if it's not in the way that I would like. I have the luxury of paying more for food that is lower in fat and fresher than most of the cheap and/or prepackaged food I grew up accustomed to. I even have the luxury to choose to eat less because I am concerned about my weight and health. I have friends who love me, and are concerned about my well being, who contact me regularly and tell me they are worried about my stress level and urge me to take time, just like the time I am taking at that moment, reading this book.
In this place, in the sunshine, in my privileged white average life, I pick the book up expecting it to be filled with story after story about women who grew up in crime ridden, drug filled neighborhoods, who literally had no food or shelter or parents or people who would help them care for themselves. I expect from the forward that this will be a book written by women who endured things like these and have found a way to have their voices heard, to be part of the conversation about things like class and race and not just be the subject of the conversation. I want to read it partly because I want to see how they view their connection to other women, and if growing up as they did, without the benefits I had, made them feel more or less connected than I do to other women around me, wonder if it gave them a sense of community or togetherness.
The author of the forward, the editor who put the collection together, rants about Barbara Ehrenreich's “Nickel And Dimed” because she hates the book. This is a thing I can get behind, also finding that book to be infuriating. The editor denounces “Nickel And Dimed” as a sham written by an upper class scholar who writes the obvious. The point of Ehrenrich's novel was that working class people are exactly that: working class, which is to say that they work very hard, often times doing demanding physical labor or jobs that the upper class would find demeaning, like cleaning houses or janitorial work, and that for this labor they are not paid enough to survive or support families or improve their financial circumstances. The book is horribly condescending because it is ABOUT the circumstance of millions of Americans who live like this, and yet does not allow those Americans to be part of a conversation about why they are there. There is no room in this book for Ehrenreich to speak to and with the people she writes about as if they are all equal in their humanity. It is written like a sociological study about a culture in another country, far removed from the writer, and the intended audience is other people like her, who cannot comprehend working a retail job stocking the shelves at Wal-Mart at night for minimum wage because having a day time job would mean paying for child care, which negates a paycheck like a high school basic algebra equation. Ehrenreich's book basically states that the humanity or worth of the working poor is somehow less than the humanity or worth of the wealthy, even while purporting to tear down those ideas.
Anyway, we both hate that book, the editor and I, and I figure that this collection is going to have somewhat the same feel as our shared rant, with the theme that women who grow up in these families often have a much different experience during childhood and adolecense then their male counterparts, and on into adulthood. The theme I am hoping to glean is that these women share a common bond with all women, that the experience of being female is somewhat the same, no matter what class you were raised, and that truths like connectedness and an ideal of a shared experience of some form of patriarchal opression can be overcome. So, I start reading it, in my privilege, out on a small mountain lake in the full sun of summer, ready for some conversations with smart women I know, about feminism and equality. I am ready to read experiences of a life I could never understand, not having experienced it, but wanting to know how people who did experience it, see it.
And I find some of that in this book. I do find some stories in this book about women who literally grew up with nothing and still found a voice, found not just words to speak about it but words to powerfully speak about it, to tell people like me who did not have to experience such a dearth of basic needs what it was like and alert us to the presence of these things in our own communities, in our own neighborhoods and towns. There is a story from a woman who managed to get loans to get to college, who describes being poor as a taste, who grew up with a crazy junkie mother and often chewed paper to try to make herself feel full. There are terrible stories about rural girls living with abusive fathers or stepfathers, and mothers who could/would not help them get away from constant sexual and physical abuse due to absolute lack of resources. There is a story written by a woman with immigrant parents who didn't speak any English, and who often were not able to provide food, about how she had to miss so much school to translate for her parents through bureaucratic red tape that she almost never graduated.
However, (and here is where I start telling you why I find this book to be so self indulgent, so hatefully ironically like “Nickel And Dimed” that I want to scream and throw it) most of what I read are masturbatory solliliqies written by women who think themselves separate from some imagined “middle class” who are smack dab in the middle of it. There is a woman who also writes about having immigrant parents, and the reader is supposed to think her life was difficult. Her story, the entirety of it, is basically that her life was boring. Seriously. Her parents were factory workers, who had steady paychecks. They worked, and worked hard. Her essay is about the kind of food she ate, and about what dinner was like in her household. She states there was always enough, but it was boring. The woman talks about how she first discovered different kinds of cuisine in college. AT SMITH. Seriously. The goddamn woman went to a prestigious and aggregiously expensive college, she talks about her semester abroad in Chile. This woman is supposed to speak for the “working class” experience? Fuck that.
Another essay is from a woman who laments her own definition of being “poor” as being “emotionally empty” because her mother passed on her longing for better “things” to her children. Her parents owned a two family home. They always had enough to eat and clothes to wear. Her essay starts out by saying that they didn't buy “brand name” food, like Jif peanut butter, or like real butter, or like Kool Aid. What the shit. Seriously?
One of the essays is written by a woman who identifies as a “femme” and her rant is about “feminists” trying to classify her or make her feel dirty because she chooses to wear suggestive clothing in bright colors and heavy makeup, and she somehow links her choice to dress/act this way back to her Midwest family of women who “showed their own brand of resistance” to “being treated like herd animals and reclaiming their sexuality” by dressing in things that “upper class feminists” would classify as “trashy” or “dirty”. Seriously?
The one that makes me the most irate is an essay written by a young, gay, white woman in San Francisco who loses her job and becomes unemployed for a while. She feels outcast by the lesbian “community” in San Fran, who she states are not really a community, but a big incestuous group that struggles just to keep everyone in it conforming. Her dad is a teacher at Community College, and a writer. She is angry because when she loses her job she becomes scared she can't pay her rent and she is angry at her friends' sense of entitlement. Her point is that she finds a sense of exhilaration when she “realizes” that not having a safety net makes you “closer to life” and gives you a sense of being “free”. I wanted to reach through the page and smack her.
I do not find a commonality with these women, and it makes me feel cheated. I resent them and their whining about being “working class” when they don't seem to know what it means any more than Erienreich does. I am almost ashamed that other women, women I know, are reading the things these women wrote, and identifying with them, and then thinking of themselves as disadvantaged, as if they have something to fight against in their... what... their attendance at Smith? The luxury of living in a house your family owns and knowing there will be food on the table, no matter how “boring” you find it to be? With the love of a good mother who provides for you and a wide family network that will catch you if you fall, and a web of friends that you don't respect and end up destroying in your own conceited sense of self indulgenge? It makes me angry because I feel like I grew up lucky, and I had less than these women did.
I was lucky. I don't find it demeaning at all that we ate margarine or that we had off brand Hamburger Helper or that sometimes we ate leftover spaghetti for 4 days. My mother worked, always full time. My father is a minister, a job that gives him satisfaction in feeling like he is following his calling, but doesn't bring in enough money to support a family. When I was in high school, my mom took out a horrendous amount of money in student loans and put herself through community college, then the University of Washington's nursing program. She graduated Magna Cum Laud, and was the first person in her family to graduate college, at all. My dad has a master's degree in Theology, also at the expense of untold student loans, that he went to school in California to finish, leaving my mom at home with my sister and I in daycare, while she worked full time.
Another friend of mine said something today while we were eating together that made me pause, and was partially responsible for me coming home and reading this book today. We were talking about a cooking class she took this week with her boyfriend, and about the woman who taught the class. My friend was saying that she wished she had a woman like this in her family, because this woman running the class talked a great deal about food being an expression of love from a woman to her family, and that the teacher expressed the view that if you are going to make a meal to feed your loved ones, you have to “do it right” by making it all fresh, and making it healthy and hearty and really taking time to make the meal carefully crafted. I almost opened my mouth to spit out something nasty about her upbringing being sheltered and that the way she was raised would probably allow time for that. I bit my tongue at the last minute because she often says things like this that really highlight the complete difference in economic situation between us, and I often respond with an unkind remark that makes her feel bad.
The way I grew up, neither of my parents had time to “do it right” by planning and then shopping for a carefully prepared meal. We shopped at Costco. We bought in bulk. My parents had an extra freezer and when we could afford it, we bought an entire car full of basic foodstuffs and froze it so we could grab it later. Our lunches were often full of prepackaged single serving foods, easy for a kid to pack for themselves. We never had name brand, it was always generic or Kroeger or Western Family. My mom had about 5 dishes we would rotate through because we could make a giant batch of it, and eat it for the rest of the week or freeze the rest for the nights that she worked after class and wouldn't have time to serve dinner after a 16 hour day. My sister and I often ate box macaroni and cheese. I don't find this demeaning, or even exceptionally “poor.” I know for a while that we would have qualified for school lunch programs but my mother believed that programs such as those should be left for people with less resources than were available to us. We had years of school shopping where we got underwear, bras, and socks new, and everything else was either a hand me down or thrift shopped. I had years when I didn't have a coat in the winter, because my mother had scraped to buy one and I thoughtlessly lost it on the playground in the middle of fall. My parents are swimming in debt, even now. Neither of them learned how to save or manage money. They will most likely never own their own home.
My friend grew up with parents who owned not just one home, but sold that home and traded up when they decided they needed more room. She and her sister needed expensive surgeries, dozens of them, and her parents not only had the access to the care they needed but the money to pay the doctors. Her mother stayed at home while her father worked. My friend got to play sports in high school, had new clothes whenever she wanted them. She never had a pair of Payless shoes. Her parents paid for her college education and for her to go abroad to Germany. She was taught to save money and to keep a safety net, something she does compulsively now, which affords her the ability to have comfort in knowing she could easily save enough to turn her already generous savings into a down payment for a house. Her parents bought her car for her. She shops at Pier One to relieve stress from her day and buys comforters that cost almost as much as a car payment for me. She has been able to take 6 vacations this year alone, flying back and forth to Ohio a few times, out to Colorado, down to Portland, and out to the coast. I am almost ashamed to admit that I resent her for her level of security even while I acknowledge that her upbringing is responsible for the the affluence she has now. Even while I know that I am not disadvantaged, that I am fortunate when so many around me are not.
How does this all connect? I am struggling to put the abstract into words now that I've gotten this far. I am looking for commonality of experience with other women, and feeling like the tidal hormonal change we all go through should be a thread that lets us transcend labels like “race” and “class”. I am looking for an ideal that says that we can use that commonality to have an honest discussion about our lives and situations, being varied and each having a unique voice. I guess I am also saying that people who are the “haves,” who have basic shelter, food, network, community, family and more than enough means to not just “survive” but to eventually have a hope of “thriving”, that these people should stop whining about how “working class” they are and actually look for a way to find that commonality, while acknowledging the means they were blessed to have. I am hoping that women, especially women like myself with the benefit of the opportunity for higher education, will take some of what is afforded to us by privilege and share some of that benefit with other women who don't have those opportunities, thereby giving another woman a chance to raise herself or her family from a “have not” without basic food, water, shelter, network and community, to a person who can classify herself as not just “surviving” but “thriving.” I am hoping that when I finish my degree, I can find ways to use the Spanish I am learning to help someone else read or write in English, a huge advantage that many immigrant families don't have. I am hoping that I can eventually have time to donate to Big Sisters programs, or before and after school tutoring available to kids from low income families, to help them succeed. I am hoping that when I finally am finished with the education I am fighting to get, I can use my teaching degree to help young women find that voice so that conversations about commonality become easier and they are inspired to share what they have with other women.
Wow, that was long winded. If you are still reading, you deserve some kind of a medal. Or maybe we can have a conversation and you can long windedly tell me what you think, too.