Trophy Wives

 Each month seems longer than the last.

April, with its cold winds and a surprise blanket of snow, feels like it’s been hanging on for a year. 

The news pelts us like hail. 

The daily tally of principles we’ve abandoned stacks up as we wait for “precedented” times to return. 

“I’m not holding my breath,” as my father would say. 

I thought of him, as I read every word of a story in the NYT this week, about a gaggle of pro-natalist “influencers” who have been seeding their sexist agenda on the style pages for several years.  

And how he, as the father of daughters -- unlike these bro-mancers of natality -- provided us with a long list of agenda items we might attain before we settled into a life of domesticity.

“Don’t get married until you are at least 25; Don’t get married until you’ve used a passport at least once; Don’t get married until you are at least 30; Don’t get married until you know who you are and what you want.”

I suppose, if I had wanted to settle into a homesteading life, like some of the strange-looking people peering through round spectacles from underneath stark white bonnets, he would have quietly supported that, too.

But he would have been sure to point out that it was, after all, a person should be free to make.

It doesn’t seem like that’s the place this cohort will exhort.

They are often industry titans or their well-funded children, supplementing their trust funds with the proceeds of page clicks for the spectacle of their self-titled traditional values. Where the women raise multiple babies and the fathers … attend conferences to proselytize the lifestyle. 

Whether it’s the novelty or the nostalgia for a time that never existed, the content generates lots of attention. 

And this week another piece showed how this small cohort of fundamentalists are poised to erode human rights even further.  Some of their ideas made my hair stand on end:

• A “National Medal of Motherhood” to women with six or more children;

• Reserving 30 percent of government fellowships for those who are married with children; 

• State-funded education programs teaching women and girls about their menstrual cycle, “so they can better understand when they are ovulating and able to conceive”;

• $5,000 cash as a ‘baby bonus’

It wasn’t enough that the president said he wanted to be the ”fertilization president,” a statement so cringy that I felt the warm acid of my stomach rise into my throat. Now we have a bro-culture that wants to corral women into a single stall of society. 

It’s telling that they are seeking to pay only lip service toward the strengthening of the family. 

They have no interest in making life easier; making childhood safer; or making communities stronger. They have no plans to bridge the widening gaps in maternal outcomes.

They will strip men and women of a comprehensive health education, and suffice with only a standing ovation of ovulation. And for each infant whose mother gets a push prize, the rest will be hard fought.

They will try to tell you that such hardship builds character and stamina, but it doesn’t. It just creates obstacles and obsolescence. 

This is not about freedom of choice, it’s about control and coercion. 

I can hear my mother’s voice bubble up in my mouth as I think about the medal mothers of myriad multiples will presumably covet in this dystopian short story brought to us by a president made for reality TV: “Would you like a medal or a chest to pin it on?”

The true reality is we want neither. And men, if you think about it, you deserve more, too.

As bell hooks wrote in her book, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love:

“In patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be who they are and to glory in their unique identity. Their value is always determined by what they do. In an antipatriarchal culture males do not have to prove their value and worth. They know from birth that simply being gives them value, the right to be cherished and loved.”

 

The Saints of Patients

 I had been sitting in the office for three-quarters of an hour. 

Waiting patiently is what’s expected … it’s written right into the terminology and my reason for being here. As I sit in this uncomfortable chair and watch a parade of people, who might have filed in after me, now take a commanding lead, I am willing to have more of it.

My patience, I can attest, is at an all-time high. I’ve had years of anxious practice.

Why, just yesterday I had shown up at roughly the same time and learned that I was a day early but still a dollar short.

Honestly, I thought it was sweet when the receptionist commiserated and told me she would have been happy to squeeze me into the schedule if there were any room.

I could see for myself that the room was packed.

When I return, the waiting room feels even more full than the day before. Occasionally there are more people than there are uncomfortable chairs for them to sit in. Timing works the way timing does, however, and as people quietly close out of one door, the loud calling of names summons folks through another.

Sighs and seats open up in roughly that order.

It’s best not to think about it too much. Don’t try to suss out a pattern. It's not something to be solved. Fair is not necessarily fair. 

I managed to smile, but I could tell from the dry heat emanating off my cheeks that I wasn’t going to be fooling anyone with my calm or cool. This wasn’t the skin condition that brought me here, but it was the one I would ride home with.

It’s good enough that we have pocket-sized arcades to keep us entertained. 

I have cycled through all the crosswords, side-words, and zigzag ones my subscription offers before I hit up the freebies. I scroll through the news before I decide games are probably better for my psyche. 

A little girl two rows away is playing a game. Bings and Blings echo through the waiting room and her mother asks her to lower the volume, which she does without complaint. She spins the controls and she and her mother start to laugh. Great, rolling giggles that flow effortlessly until their name comes up and they disappear behind the door. 

One after another until the room is almost empty.

I don’t hear them call my name … 

Well, I hear it … It’s just not the name my mother gave me so I don’t think they mean me.

I check my watch … which tells me it’s only a few clicks until the noon hour.

But then I look around and notice there’s no one left. 

I stand up, and ask the person I can’t see past the still-open door if they meant me … and the person, who steps out with the clipboard, confirms they did, indeed.

And in no time I am through the rigamarole and into a paper gown. An exam, an excision, and an exit take place before a break for lunch will commence.

It was just a bothersome spot, not any spot of bother. 

No need to worry.

Until next year.

Many Avenues Ahead

A string of paper lanterns dangled criss-crossed the avenue high overhead. 

At least I think it was an avenue.

We had followed our leader through the city center … under a bridge and through cordoned-off streets ... to this magical place: Chinatown. 

It all seems to pass by in a blur. I hadn’t tried to commit the street signs to memory.

Our guide directed our attention left and right, and details we might have missed came into sharp focus. 

There is a stairway cleaved into the cement pillars of the bridge that connects the boroughs. “When you come this summer that should be one of the first things you do,” she says with serious excitement. 

I could see the spark of it all in my son’s reaction. I watched his expression catch fire. As we pressed on toward our destination for a late lunch, I could guess that new possibilities were beginning to reveal themselves. 

Shops brim with souvenirs: a tiny parade lion marionette catches my eye. It seems like a perfect replica of the elaborate costumes I’ve seen in photographs, but it is made of crafting basics: paperboard and white feather fluff. This cardboard lion leads a battalion of colorful compatriots into a jaunty little battle on the breeze.

Soon we are seated at a round table contemplating what to choose from the Dim Sum menu. The place smells warm and wonderful. We order – awkwardly pronouncing the dishes and affirming – that we would be ordering two of just about everything. Our waiter delivers a pot of tea, which I pour out into little cups.

Everyone else seems entirely comfortable. They share a plate or two by expertly plucking morsels out of steam baskets with chopsticks. None seem to slip from their grasp the way that mine do. They don’t have to resort to the comical single-prong-soup-spoon approach I have elected to ensure no dumpling goes uneaten.

I should be embarrassed but I am not.

I am hopeful. I am excited.

My son is conversing with us as he snatches a slice of beef and a spear of broccoli from his father’s plate. He is personable and excited, chatting easily with our guide, an old friend, and, who, as Kismet happens, works at the university where he will be attending come fall.

I could picture him here  … without us.

Of course, he would avail himself of the meal plan … He would cycle through burgers and pizzas and other deep-fried favorites that are dished up in short order. He was also likely, with some planning, to meander into the communal kitchen late at night to cook himself an egg sandwich or microwave a lasagna. 

At home, he will leave a pile of dishes in the sink after his late-night forage, and as much as it might irk me I know he will clean up after himself because it is a courtesy not just expected.

I know he will expect more of himself as he ventures into the world. In time, I know he will come back to this restaurant and he will undoubtedly find others. He will make friends and they will become a part of this neighborhood in their way. It will be his place of comfort, too. 

Buyers' remorse

When I opened up my email this week, a T-shirt company to which I had been a loyal and reliable customer over the past 20 years confronted me with a haunting consumer milestone:

 “Do you remember the first T-shirt you ever bought from us? We do!”  And there … as I scrolled through the email’s hopeful and nostalgic sales pitch … past a graphic littered with colorful illustrations of several now-defunct artifacts of technological advances … compact and floppy disks; film canisters; VHS tapes, and even some tech dinosaur holdovers, like cordless phones and desktop computers …. There it was …

A picture of the first silly t-shirt I ever bought from the interwebs. 

It read:

“Everyone Poops.”

Mind you, this had nothing to do with the children’s book of the same phase by Minna Unchi, but rather it was a silly riff on the similarly implied understanding of our shared humanity.

Of course, I remembered the purchase immediately. 

Just above those two little words were the silhouettes of an elephant and a donkey facing one another; their figures were bisected by a single, slender stripe and a few stars. Under the animals’ hind ends were two jaunty, swirl-topped piles to punctuate the scatological point that a different way of looking at each other could potentially heal our deepening political divisions.

The shirt was baby blue and its design was silk-screened in a decidedly healthy bowel-movement-colored brown. 

The year was 2008 and my husband was the recipient of that particular piece of nostalgia.

I remember how we laughed at our Election Day plans for that shirt.

The moment WAS historic. It was the first Tuesday in November and our new little family of four was headed to the polls.  

The shirt seemed like a safe, albeit cheeky choice. No one would accuse us of electioneering when my husband, standing in front of the polls with our year-old son straddling his hip, opened his coat to show the slogan as I snapped a picture before the two of them disappeared behind the curtain to pull a lever.

How hopeful we were. How unified we expected to be.

Back then we didn’t really think the Constitution was just filled with words to be twisted into something as ugly as what we are seeing from our nation’s capitol on a daily basis. 

The picture is as clear to me now as it was then. What is fuzzy now is the warm feeling of looking forward to good change. ... humanistic change. The promise of our nation moving closer to the goal our founders set for us to be more perfect. 

Instead, we seem to be in a race to destroy it all.

All those quaint ideas ... like Voting Rights, Women’s Rights, a government Of and for The People, and the Rule of Law.

Eroding day by day.

Until all that is left is that stupid t-shirt … with its empty slogan, as defunct now as all the CDs Columbia House once made us believe would last forever, and a stalker-y sales pitch from a company that has been tracking my every purchase.

What seems so very clear now is that we are not the same. 

We may all poop, but only one of us – the one with the extended probosci – seems to revel in smearing it all over the hallowed walls of government.

And that is the Elephant in the room.