Where are my marbles?

Once last year I traveled for four days, but other than that, this trip to D.C. -- parts of four days -- was the longest I've been away in four years. When I came home, my baby (Max, 21 mos.) ignored me, and when I insisted on bathing him, he cried and begged for Daddy. The twins acted cool and said, "Oh hi mommy", and then started cutting up living room comforters with scissors (not the worst plan for dealing with strong emotions, I suppose). Today Oliver asks, "You're going to work now?", and Wesley says, "Mommy goes away in the green car." They expect me to leave, and Daddy to stay.

I made a vow when Max was an infant. Staring into his eyes, falling in love as never before, I said, "You should never cry. I'll always give you everything you want." I laughed as I said it, but only a little. I'm losing my marbles today over his anger at me. Does he remember that outrageous promise, whispered in his little week-old ears?

Maybe he does, so I'm working to earn back their love. Raisin spice cake in a castle-shaped bundt pan. Swimming at the pool. Candy. Whatever they want on TV. As a mother, I'm saying to my children exactly what I, as a child, said to my mother. I'll be good. Please love me. I won't be bad ever again. (You only get love if you earn it, right?)

Maybe this is the wrong approach. Maybe all the love that all of us need is right here. Maybe we were all loved enough even when I was gone. Maybe anger doesn't mean there isn't also love -- it's just anger, and nothing more. Maybe even Max still loves me -- enough to get mad and still believe I'll give him meals, hugs, and jammies when he needs them. I'm going to stop earning their love back, and just believe that it's there for me. But the cake's already there, so we might as well enjoy it. And the pool...we'll still go, but for the right reason (because it's fun).

Where's your hat?

The Inauguration was amazing. An experience of a lifetime. Seeing so many African-Americans -- some bundled up against the cold, some dressed in furs, others decked out in church clothes -- but all happy, felt better than I expected. I think after years of living among urban African-Americans, I began to lower my expectations. Without realizing it was happening, I came to believe that social justice comes only in scraps and crumbs. At the Inauguration, no scraps were handed out to the descendents of slaves -- it was the whole table set for them. It was the most decisive and public step forward for racial justice in America in my lifetime.

My friend and I joined the throngs for awhile and then gathered with a group at a Capitol Hill home to watch the event on TV. When Aretha Franklin appeared, one of my friends commented on the audacity of her hat. The criticism made me angry. Aretha didn't just wear that hat; she asserted it. Good for her. There is so much more beauty to African-American culture than just rap music and athletics. I hope having a black President makes way for African-American history, poetry, worship, prayer, kinship, and even church fashion to be more than an ethnic accessory on the same old same old whiteness. I'm not saying that whites need to try to act black -- though I'm sure they will in record numbers and it will be just as awkward as ever. I'm saying we'll become something new as the most beautiful parts of African-American culture grace our lives.

Just this morning in class, for the first time in my teaching career, white students began to problematize their whiteness without me initiating the topic. Will a white person be seen as racist if she criticizes Obama? Will white Republicans be suspected of racism simply for being Republican? All of a sudden whiteness has become a problem - not in a bad sense, but in that it is no longer neutral. Against a Black President, whiteness becomes visible, and we whites have to take race into account in new ways -- not just as an act of charity toward people of color, but because we see our own complicity and ensnarement in the foolishness of racial classification. It was one of the best classes I've ever taught. (This post is rather ebulliant, don't you think? Back from D.C. just 24 hours ago, I've not yet deflated.)

And maybe within the span of the Obama administration, we'll all be wearing hats to church. I've already picked out mine.

Why I'm a Professor and not Director of Career Services

Partly embarrassed and partly thinking he was being funny, a student said, "Yeah, I even kind of got career advice from a homeless guy." He had gone to the homeless shelter to serve as a volunteer, and found himself being the receipient of a homeless man's volunteerism.

We discussed this encounter at length in my urban neighborhoods class. "Homeless" is a totalizing label, like "colored" or "crazy." The person to whom the label is attached immediately depreciates in value. They likely have little to offer, and surely know nothing about the world of the privileged. Words like troubled, poor, and in need seem to sum them up.

"Homeless" is often a temporary descriptor - it is not the measure of a person. And if you know anything about the way capitalism requires excess labor in order to drive wages down, you'd respect the destitute for taking their extremely difficult place in the same system we are positioned in. "Homeless" also tells little about a person's capacity to offer career advice. Many homeless people are addicts or mentally ill, but even they likely have had more jobs, gone on more interviews, and interacted with more employers and colleagues than any of my college students. Why not learn from their experience? They are your elders, I said to my undergraduates, and deserve your respect.

My student was brilliant, allowing himself to experience the cognitive dissonance of having "helper-client" roles reversed. He meant to help, but really he needed help too. He thought "the least of these" were lying in the cots, but one was looking back at him in the mirror. His eventual employment will surely be the better for having taken career advice from a homeless man.

I'm off!

I've been ruminating and planning and worrying about traffic for two months, and I did it. I'm off to the Inauguration!

I love massive Mall events -- I was there for Clinton's second Inauguration, the Million Man March, a July 4, and the Millenium. During our years in Minnesota I missed being part of national gatherings of citizens, and I want to make the most of living just 2 hours away now.

My plan is to park at a friend's house in Virginia and stay at a friend's house on Capitol Hill, then metro out of the city on Tues to my car. Piece of cake (ha!).

By watching it on TV, you'll see more than I will, I'm sure, but I'll be there and will always remember that I was there.

The weekend is also titled "professor's retreat", during which, in the absence of my childcare responsibilities, I will try read 7 books that I'm teaching spring semester and grade 42 papers. If American can elect an African-American President, then surely I can at least get my work done, don't you think?

When in Rome

 

When in inner city D.C., learn to enjoy barbecue ribs and greens. When in south central Pennsylvania, learn to shoot. Well, I suppose I could have learned to shoot in inner city D.C., too, but it would have been unladylike and at odds with my racial identity in that context. Here, to some, white women's beauty is enhanced when they wield a rifle.

I'm a big believer in cultural relativism -- learn to see the world the way others do, and participate in their world as fully as possible. But gun culture...frankly, it was frightening. Even for a low-testosterone human like myself, shooting brought a huge shot of adrenaline and feelings of power. The danger was exciting. But then I felt disturbed by realizing that millions of my co-citizens have guns in their homes and on their persons, and the opportunity to kill oneself or one's neighbor is only a finger's reach away. I had never held a gun before today, and have only one fairly distant relative who keeps guns in the home - it's not part of my upbringing. But I can appreciate the complexity of gun knowledge, and can see why many (like the friend who took my husband and I out) collect guns and gun trivia.

I shot a rifle and said, "I like it!" Then a handgun and said, "I'm scared. I'll go wait in the car now." Thus ends my very brief ethnographic exploration of white rural American gun culture.

Consider the Cow

"The Original Working Mother" titled a display at the Pennsylvania Farm Show. Attributes of the original working mother included "powerful," "productive," "strong," and "large." The original working mother is a cow, of course, being praised for her ability to excel simultaneously at production and reproduction. Impressed, my twins and I moved on to the swine barn where the bovine working mother would meet her match. A litter of piglets were nursing, sleeping, and playing in the shade cast by their enormous mother. A suckling piglet caught my eye first -- the shake of her head as she latched on and the efficient machinations of her jaw as she sucked struck a deja-vu of my own nursing days. I guess nothing's more like a suckling mammal than another suckling mammal (my boys are piggish in more ways than one - I still call my youngest "Stinky").

But what most caught my eyes were the sow's teats, all fourteen of them. Her entire belly sagged with mammary tissue, pinky-white and lightly hairy. It caught the eyes of her piglets, too, who drank themselves into milky stupor. One piglet snarfed around her belly, nuzzling one spot and then another, finally latching on for dear life to one soft, generous teat. His satisfaction was palpable. The sow's teats were saggy, supple, and giving. They were not private, exotic items to be displayed as sexual accessories; they had been called into service like hands or eyes, needed for a day's work. They weren't displayed in comparison to any other teats. They just were.

A friend, in her mid-20s with one pregnancy and delivery under her belt, worries about the state of her body in comparison with other women her age. I commiserate, wishing I could have back the breasts, the belly, the legs, the brain, the hair, the skin, and the tear ducts (my eye dr. blames my newly acquired eye dryness on pregnancy!) I used to have. My young friend will get a good portion of her health and beauty back, and I, twelve years her senior with three recent pregnancies in rapid succession, know my best years aren't behind me. But the truth is that we don't really get it back, and we don't deserve to. Prepartum feminine beauty is like money; it's made for spending, not hoarding, and the best we can do is spend it wisely. Babies certainly aren't the only worthy investment, but they are a good one.

Looking at the breast of another nursing mother, I finally felt encouraged about the state of my postpartum, post-nursing body. I was among my own kind there in the swine barn; my breasts look more like the sow's than like models and actresses of my own species. And that working mother cow just kept doing her thing, not taking any shit from traditionalist bulls or patriarchial bovine theology. Both females are exemplars of their respective species, devoting their appetite, their sexuality, and their life energy to things that matter.

Jesus told people to look at the lilies, but that's just the beginning. Working mothers, consider the cow. Nursing moms, see the sow. Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.

Is Yankee Doodle Truly Dandy?

Just lighten up! Let it go! People have said that to me since early childhood, but I just can't do it. Sometimes I feel like I'm coming unhinged trying to process the barrage of social messages that come at me through my children's lives. Today it's Yankee Doodle.

Yankee Doodle went to town
A-riding on a pony
Stuck a feather in his cap
And called it macaroni.

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy.

I know this has Civil War origins, and the first stanza is just being silly. A feather that gets called macaroni? Now that's funny stuff. But what does it mean to be handy with the girls? I already don't like the fact that Yankee Doodle gets individuality, a name, and protagonist standing, whereas "the girls" are an indistinguishable group. But furthermore, I don't know what he is doing with the girls when he is "handy." And I realize that by today's standards he would be flaming gay, what with the feather in his cap and being called 'dandy' and loving musical theatre, but I'm not as concerned with that issue in this instance.

My boys were singing it last night, and I worried about possibly negative messages regarding how they ought to relate to women.

Do you know what "handy" means? And do you have alternate lyrics for that phrase? I know this song has many verses and many permutations.

By the way, the only women featured as central characters in their nursery rhyme book are Little Miss Muffet (the damsel in distress), the Old Woman who Lived in a Shoe (the bad mother), and a queen (a great character in an obscure song I don't even know). Don't think I don't see the gender archetypes you're teaching, Nursery Rhymes for Children With Accompanying CD. I'm on to you.

The Ethnographic Spirituality Tour

I'm teaching Harrisburg Neighborhoods this January. Yesterday someone asked me if I take students around to hear guest speakers and see interesting sites in the city. No way! said I. That would be boring, and cities are exciting. That would be canned, and urban life is unscripted. That would be controlled by the professor, and life is not like that.

Students learn ethnographic skills -- how to use participant-observation to learn about life as it happens, where it happens. They are assigned a neighborhood and spend as much time there as possible for a month, trying to move from an outsider's to an insider's perspective. The credibility of their work is based on their experience at the site, not books they read or experts they consulted or fieldtrips they attended.

While describing my class, I realized that my spirituality tour - mentioned in the last post - will have to be ethnographic. I don't want to rely on religious experts to guide me through a lifetime of church visits and guest speakers and preachers. I want to learn about spirituality by living it, by being there, not just by reading about it or listening to other people talk about it. I want to move from detached observer to full participant -- of my own life.

Anthropology is great.

I would not like to be on fire

I can't stop thinking about this post at Dry Bones Dance. Christy says she's setting out on the Christy Spirituality Tour 2009, looking for people and places that will help her rebuild the "house" she's been demolishing for several years.

As I listened to a Christian speaker recently, I felt tired and thought, "Don't assimilate me into your discourse." Though it was about a specific topic, the talk essentially gave me options for positioning myself as a religious person -- in this particular religious group or out, providing outreach or needing charity, praising or petitioning, on fire for God (wouldn't that hurt?) or just blowing smoke. So much of organized religion is about just that - organization.

Churches organize people, funds, help, and childcare, and it's great when they do it well. But they also organize our identities, encouraging us to perceive ourselves and to project a public self that is (among other things) saved or damned, good or bad, or on the path or straying. That kind of organizational discourse is not helpful -- a person could be in good standing within the discourse yet be rotten in their heart, and vice versa (the wine and the wineskins). A person could spend their entire spiritual journy positioning and repositioning herself in a temporal social discourse. Even if the words are big ones like "Christian", "saved", "moral", or "sanctified", they're still just words. I want to pursue the God beyond discourse, the experience of the truth to which those big words refer. I can, and I will, but how much more wonderful if church could support the journey.

Maybe we should be clear about what we're trying to do in church -- when we're organizing people and resources, let's do it well. But when it comes to personal identity, maybe Jesus' admonition to judge not (Sermon on the Mount) could first be applied to the self. We need to live our lives, and the living will be so much more clear and joyful if judgments are released. The pursuit of truth and morality could be so much more pure if one were not at the same time pursuing eternal self-interest.

Shouldn't we each be on our own personal Spirituality Tour of this world?

Merry Christmas (last year)

If you'd like to have received our family Christmas letter, go here.

See Boy. See Boy Learn Patriarchy.

 

I got out my original Hungry Hungry Hippos game, stamped "1978" on the bottom. It was irreparably broken, so I purchased a new one. From 1978-2009, there's no change except for the font style on the name stickers. Same hippos, same shape, and same insatiable hunger for marbles. The hippos also have the same colors and same names: Henry, Homer, Harry and Happy.

The gender balance is 1 female to 3 males. The males each have a recognizable name, but the female isn't given a name -- she's only identified by a perpetually positive emotional state. The female is first marginalized numerically, and then trivialized and dehumanized (dehippo-ized?) by color and attribution.

I played the game recently with the game's preferred gender imbalance: me, one three-year-old boy, one twenty-year-old man and one forty-year-old man. The men smiled at my analysis. One said, "Seriously, Jenell, Happy Hippo is marginalized and trivialized?"

How else are we -- boys and girls, men and women -- taught our birthright positions in patriarchial systems? There are no public lectures or after-school specials on the subject. It's taught through games, colors, jokes, casual comments, common phrases, shape of shoes, comfort of pants, and even hungry hungry hippos. This game teaches gender relations: that women may be referred to by sex instead of name, that women should be be happy instead of sad or angry, and that women lead with their emotions. It prepares a girl to one day find herself sitting at a conference table at work or church, outnumbered by men, having her experiences and perspectives trivialized. It prepares a boy to one day find himself sitting around a table where only one woman is present, and maybe not even ask her name, and to think this is acceptable. Of course I'm serious about Happy Hippo's plight. It makes me furious when I see patriarchal values sneaking into my home via games, action figures, pajama prints, sippy cup decorations, toothbrushes, and the like.

My commentary may be lost on the two men I was playing with, but I wasn't speaking primarily for their benefit. My son listens to me, even if he's only 3. We'll play Hungry Hungry Hippo -- it's a good and fun part of our culture -- but he'll see me play confidently with any color hippo, and when I get the pink one, he'll hear me call her Helen.