When I was a stay-at-home mama of a young child, I described the difference between my everyday life and my old life as an employed middle-manager thus: You know that day when you have an important meeting and you oversleep and the blouse you want to wear needs to be ironed and while you’re carrying your briefcase and your lunchbox and your handbag and your gym bag out the back door you notice that your socks don’t match and just then one of your bags snags on the door handle and you spill your coffee onto the blouse you just ironed and as you’re pulling out of the driveway you notice out of your rear-view mirror that your cell phone and coffee mug are flying off the top of your car and smashing onto the neighbor’s driveway?
When you’re a stay-at-home mama of a young child, every day is that day. And some days every moment is that moment.
I came to understand that the indefatigable demands on my attention, the fact that no single task could be completed in a uninterupted linear progression, and the way in which every single thing I ever did was compromised, imperfect, in some critical way, consumed the totality of my patience. Life as a stay-at-home-mom consumed more than my allotment of patience in fact, daily compounding a patience debt that no single sweaty workout, uninterupted night’s sleep or moms’ night out could replenish. I was forever in the red.
The toll of being so overdrawn came in the loss of my resiliance. I was, frequently and suddenly, brittle, burned out, undone. Having used up my store of go-with-the-flow in a string of napless days, I freaked out when I burned the onions for supper. Allotting my available easy-does-it to grocery shopping with a toddler, I snapped when Sweetie wondered where her clean laundry might be. Creativity, compassion, laughter dulled as my flexible was spent on endless high-intensity unpredictable mutlitasking.
This winter reminded me of that time. I spent my resiliance, my rebound, on the first two feet of snow, then the next foot of snow, then the improbable next foot that piled on to the towering banks. I used up my roll with it the first week I lost a days’ income, then the next week when I lost two days’ income, then the days my clients wanted to see me but the school cancelled, or the school opened and the clients couldn’t come. By the time the roof sagged and leaked, we ripped the rear-view mirror off my car backing it out of the garage, the alternator blew, and the hot-water-heater spewed, I had no more flow to go with.
When the world became an icy slip-and-slide one Monday morning between the time I arrived at the gym and the time I attempted to drive home, I had no more cushion of resiliance in me. My tires glided over the blacktop and when I tapped the brakes the car lurched slowly into a grotesque piroette. The snowpiles rose up like bowling bumpers to slow my spin as I steered into the skid. My heart didn’t even bother to beat fast. I sat at the side of the road stunned and defeated until a public works guy slid his way across the street to tell me to try again, I was going to get hit if I stayed there. So I rode the snowbank down, crunching along at five-miles-per-hour until I found my way off that hill.
It’s slow going on the way to mud-season. It takes longer than need be and we are almost numb with the cost of winter before it comes. Insult adds to injury, my girl gets sick just as the snow starts to melt and we add sick days to snow days and wonder how to cover the bills and add to the kitchen fund. Roll with it we do, even if the roll is a sickening spin of the car and the late-breaking anxious pulse that comes the next time the sky looks like rain. We bow to the will of the world. What choice do we have? What doesn’t bend, breaks.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Sunday, March 13, 2011
mind body mama: Whose Fault?
Last Sunday I asked a room full of teen self defense students,
“If someone chooses to assault you whose fault is that?”
It was the giggliest of the bunch who answered solemnly, “His fault.”
I concurred. “And if you were somewhere you shouldn’t be, hanging out with a bad crowd, wearing the wrong shoes, and someone chose to assault you? Then whose fault is it?”
Her face clouded. “His fault?” she said with less certainty.
In her opinion of February 28, 2011 UMass Collegian columnist Yevgeniya Lomakina stumbled on the same question—and, unlike my young student, did not come up with the right answer.
Lomakina wrote, “If a young woman wears a promiscuous outfit to a party, then proceeds to drink and flirt excessively, she should not blame men for her downfall. She made a decision to dress a certain way, to consume alcohol and should be prepared to deal with the consequences. Far from being a victim of rape, she is a victim of her own choices.”
It’s tempting to see Lomakina’s stunning misogyny—like her factual inaccuracies and poor writing—as a reflection of her own (and her editor’s) journalistic inexperience.
But then on March 8, New York Times reporter James C. McKinley Jr. found it relevant when reporting on the sexual assault of an 11-year-old girl by 18 men and boys to include these observations,
It can be difficult to hold onto two apparently paradoxical truths. First, that women and parents can increase their own and their children’s safety by employing self protection skills. Second, that the ultimate responsibility for sexual assault always falls unambiguously on the assailant.
Among my teens, it was the oldest, boldest girl who called me out on this apparent contradiction.
“Why isn’t it your fault?” she challenged. “If you make bad choices, if you take risks you shouldn’t take, why isn’t it your fault if you get hurt?”
I offered a metaphor. “What is the difference between leaving your car unlocked and not having it stolen, and leaving your car unlocked and having it stolen?”
“The difference is a thief. The difference is some person—not you—who chose to steal your car.”
I teach self defense because I want girls and women to have every tool imaginable to keep themselves safe. Many of these tools are skills of judgment, intuition and decision making. Often we keep ourselves safe by assessing the risk of a situation and taking action to reduce our exposure to that risk.
But we should be able to be at our most vulnerable and not be subject to someone else’s choice to take advantage of that vulnerability. We should be able to underdress and overdrink without risking anything worse than a cold and a hangover. We should be able to be 11 years old. Whether or not we are hanging out with older boys, whether or not our mother is watching us.
There is a reason we persist in blaming the victims of sexual assault, even when the victims are ourselves. If we can assign a reason for why the attack occurred—she was in the wrong place, her mother wasn’t supervising her, she flirted too much—we can promise ourselves that, because we’ll never engage in that behavior, we’ll always be safe.
One in six American women will experience a rape or attempted rape in her lifetime. That’s not because one sixth of American women go to the wrong neighborhood or dress provocatively. It’s not because they drink too much or flirt too much or because their self defense failed them.
One in six American women experience sexual assault because there are a lot of rapists out there. It is up to all of us to stop giving them quarter. The first step is to stop justifying their crime by blaming their victims.
“If someone chooses to assault you whose fault is that?”
It was the giggliest of the bunch who answered solemnly, “His fault.”
I concurred. “And if you were somewhere you shouldn’t be, hanging out with a bad crowd, wearing the wrong shoes, and someone chose to assault you? Then whose fault is it?”
Her face clouded. “His fault?” she said with less certainty.
In her opinion of February 28, 2011 UMass Collegian columnist Yevgeniya Lomakina stumbled on the same question—and, unlike my young student, did not come up with the right answer.
Lomakina wrote, “If a young woman wears a promiscuous outfit to a party, then proceeds to drink and flirt excessively, she should not blame men for her downfall. She made a decision to dress a certain way, to consume alcohol and should be prepared to deal with the consequences. Far from being a victim of rape, she is a victim of her own choices.”
It’s tempting to see Lomakina’s stunning misogyny—like her factual inaccuracies and poor writing—as a reflection of her own (and her editor’s) journalistic inexperience.
But then on March 8, New York Times reporter James C. McKinley Jr. found it relevant when reporting on the sexual assault of an 11-year-old girl by 18 men and boys to include these observations,
Residents in the neighborhood where [the assault occurred] said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said.These reporters give voice to the persistent belief that someone other than the attackers—the victims or, should they be minor children, their mothers— are to blame for sexual assault.
“Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?” said Ms. Harrison, one of a handful of neighbors who would speak on the record.
It can be difficult to hold onto two apparently paradoxical truths. First, that women and parents can increase their own and their children’s safety by employing self protection skills. Second, that the ultimate responsibility for sexual assault always falls unambiguously on the assailant.
Among my teens, it was the oldest, boldest girl who called me out on this apparent contradiction.
“Why isn’t it your fault?” she challenged. “If you make bad choices, if you take risks you shouldn’t take, why isn’t it your fault if you get hurt?”
I offered a metaphor. “What is the difference between leaving your car unlocked and not having it stolen, and leaving your car unlocked and having it stolen?”
“The difference is a thief. The difference is some person—not you—who chose to steal your car.”
I teach self defense because I want girls and women to have every tool imaginable to keep themselves safe. Many of these tools are skills of judgment, intuition and decision making. Often we keep ourselves safe by assessing the risk of a situation and taking action to reduce our exposure to that risk.
But we should be able to be at our most vulnerable and not be subject to someone else’s choice to take advantage of that vulnerability. We should be able to underdress and overdrink without risking anything worse than a cold and a hangover. We should be able to be 11 years old. Whether or not we are hanging out with older boys, whether or not our mother is watching us.
There is a reason we persist in blaming the victims of sexual assault, even when the victims are ourselves. If we can assign a reason for why the attack occurred—she was in the wrong place, her mother wasn’t supervising her, she flirted too much—we can promise ourselves that, because we’ll never engage in that behavior, we’ll always be safe.
One in six American women will experience a rape or attempted rape in her lifetime. That’s not because one sixth of American women go to the wrong neighborhood or dress provocatively. It’s not because they drink too much or flirt too much or because their self defense failed them.
One in six American women experience sexual assault because there are a lot of rapists out there. It is up to all of us to stop giving them quarter. The first step is to stop justifying their crime by blaming their victims.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)