here i am again

Back where I started. In my husband's office while he works, tucked into his armchair with blanket, cat, and laptop, although no tea this time. Oh, I've been negligent. But I'll do better from now on, starting tomorrow.

signs of hope

When the gods of fashion decree that women should start dressing the way I do, I get very nervous. These days, full skirts with delicate patterns and plain, conservative, form-fitting twinsets are everywhere, in soothing pastel colors. Linen sheaths are back in style. And ballerina flats are in again.

This should make me happy, because it means that I can find good clothes everywhere, without frustration. I've always been a conservative dresser. But that's just the problem. I'm not a conservative. It's one thing to go against the grain, to look feminine and innocuous when you're really not, a radical in long skirts and pearls, which is what I once was when I was an academic. But it's ominous when other women start dressing the way you do, simply because it happens to be the style of the day. I start to look over my shoulder, wondering what The Powers That Be are trying to tell us.

What worries me is that this is yet another manifestation of the same trend that has me seeing supermarket tabloids everywhere pondering whether Julia Roberts has another baby on the way. I forget which glossy it was--InStyle? People? Us? They all kind of run together. The cover article showed Roberts (of whom I've never been a big fan--Annette Bening always seemed classier to me) smiling her customary toothy smile, while the headline pondered not the next step of her career but whether she would have another baby. It's like an epidemic. Actresses are spurned and pitied because they won't give their golden-boy husbands heirs, and their successors are fawned over. A poor girl who should have been going to college and making something of herself, instead already overwhelmed with fame, marries badly and apparently makes some childrearing mistakes which result in plenty of tsk-tsking and clucking from former sycophants. Suddenly, it's fashionable to eschew one's acting career in favor of motherhood, and to talk about how much more mature one has become ever since one reproduced.

It's an extreme manifestation, I know, of this so-called movement of well-educated, upper-middle-class women out of high-powered jobs and back into the house to attempt to be perfect wives and mothers. Jennifer Weiner covered this ground extremely well in Goodnight Nobody. Why do they do it? Do they think, somehow, that it's easier, less stressful to spend one's days doing childcare and housework (if, in fact, one attempts to do it without paid assistance)? If so, I suspect that they've simply taken their ambitious, competitive one-upmanship into a new arena where they try to outdo everyone else for the title of Mother Of the Year.

My poor sister is a case in point. At the end of this month I'll be heading home for my older niece's birthday party. My sister is in medicine, and she essentially works a 36-hour day. Her male colleagues all have wives at home who plan elaborate birthday parties for their children, to which the children of co-workers are all invited--not so much, I suspect, for the sake of the children's enjoyment, but for the sake of impressing their parents. My sister is not that kind of person, but the parties to which her children are invited are so elaborate that she is pressured into planning two--one for co-workers, one for family. The party "for show" usually takes place in some commercial venue--a "Build a Bear" shop or an athletic club or an ice-skating rink. (McDonald's and Chuck-E-Cheese parties are apparently passe.) The "real" party, for family and friends, is a private affair with cake and ice cream and cold cuts and veggie sticks. I don't go to the first party, needless to say. It's probably not up to her colleagues' standards, but L's heart simply isn't in it. It's exhausting for the children, though.

Women think they can avoid the rat race by dropping out, but what seems to happen is that they simply create a new rat race for themselves. I sometimes wonder if I unconsciously took myself out of the competition by not having children, and if I'd be any different if I was constantly being forced to compare the childhoods of my offspring with those of others in my peer group. And I often think it's the reason why some of my best friends are parents of small children: they know they can rely on me as a nonjudgmental sounding board. They'll never have to deal with any of that snotty Flanaganism when they walk into my house on a Saturday afternoon for a cup of tea while the kids shriek gleefully and run around after the cats (who pretend to be annoyed, but love the attention).

I think a big error on the part of both the left and the right is to see feminism as an ideology, rather than a necessary approach to the world. Feminism has benefited any woman who has had the opportunity to publish a book, to hold down a job, to have a voice in our society. All it essentially says is that women's choices are not limited to the domestic sphere, and that their desires have the same weight as those of men. And most feminists I know don't care whether some women decide to stay home with their children. We all have different ambitions, different abilities. Feminism is really about having the same ability to make choices about how to live one's life that men have. And so if I want to have a hot meal on the table for my husband when he comes home (because I love to cook and he loves my cooking), it doesn't make me any less of a feminist than the woman who comes home and puts her feet up and orders carryout because she doesn't even know how to scramble an omelet. Or who heats up a frozen lasagna with a bottle of wine and a loaf of good bread and a salad. Or who lets her husband cook her dinner (the horror! the horror!).

Anyways, I worry that all this, on top of new and apparently increasingly successful efforts to control women's reproductive choices, signals a return to the bad old days for women. But then I realize: this has all happened before. In the eighties, under Ronald Reagan, when the religious right started to see its numbers rise.

And what happened after that? We had a decade I will actually remember fondly, the 1990s, under Mr. Clinton, and freedom and optimism soared, I think, as a kind of backlash against the repressions of 80s conservatism. It was a kind of renaissance, aided by the wonderful advent of the Internet, at which I will never cease to marvel.

I keep hoping that history will repeat itself as it did in the nineties, and, before that, in the sixties. If there is a forced return to the 1950s, surely more women will follow in the footsteps of Betty Friedan, will stand up and breathe in the fresh air and say, "This is drudgery! I'm miserable! I want to get out of the house, have my own work, have my own life again!" Oh, you can be sure that the jackals will start howling again about the irrevocable damage to the children and the emasculation of menfolk and all that. But I married a latchkey child, the son of a single mother who worked full days and didn't return home to make supper until after six, and last night he pointed out to me over dinner that he turned out rather well, and that he respects his mother for making her own way instead of remaining in the kind of Stepford marriage these pundit biddies like Flanagan, Crittenden, O'Beirne and others seem to advocate.

housekeeping notes

This evening the house, by and large, smells of lavender and pine and orange. It also smells somewhat fresher than before, because it was so pleasant and sixtyish outside and I opened the large windows in the library and dining room downstairs and in the master bedroom upstairs. It is a very pleasant scent indeed.

Nights like tonight always evoke Delius' On hearing the first cuckoo in Spring. I think it calls forth a memory I have of being a girl and listening to WFLN-FM, the now sadly defunct classical radio station in Philadelphia while shuffling my 3x5 index cards (silly reader--they weren't my hip PDA, but my research notes!) and writing a term paper for history class. Spring was a time for accomplishment and assessment, for preparing to leave behind the old year. I think it was snippets of Delius, and maybe Holst, and Vaughan Williams, that began my lifelong affair with the English Romantics.

But I digress from the original purpose of this post, which was to confess what an occasional housekeeper I truly am, and how exhausting it is to cope with the consequences of that condition.

This weekend I ambitiously embarked on spring cleaning. I prepared for myself a long list of tasks and accomplished about half of them.

Kitchen: impeccable, although the pantry still needs attending.

Living room: clean, dusted, all accumulated magazines (four years' worth of the Nation and assorted alumni magazines from graduate and undergraduate institutions, for pity's sake) discarded. National Geographic, and X's favorite subscription, saved and stored. All books that have migrated downstairs for one reason or another (from a Douglas Adams omnibus to Roosevelt's Secret War and a history of the 38th Welsh Division), put back where they belong. This, I must point out, was no small feat.

Library: dusted. Alas, the books are a mess. My goal in the future is to catalogue every one of them by its Library of Congress number and order them accordingly, but I have no idea when I will find the time to undertake such a monumental task.

Downstairs and upstairs entirely vacuumed, thanks to X, who alone wields the Dyson.

Garage cleaned, thanks to X, who has some motivation in this regard: he received, as a birthday present, a rather nice jigsaw and wanted to get his workshop into a condition worthy of the new addition.

Only thirty of the sixty tasks I'd set for myself got completed, but I'd say that's a pretty good start. The challenge, of course, is to try to maintain that level of order throughout the week. I would like very much to live in a perfectly ordered house. I would like to see if indeed it can be done.

the little foxes

I dearly wish someone would explain why I should be all upset over the fact that people are coming into this country illegally.

I'm sorry, but I just can't get up the outrage, other than to be upset that people sometimes die in horrible ways because they are desperate.

I knew a man who was an illegal immigrant once. I taught him writing at night school. He held down three different jobs and had a daughter who was an undergraduate at a distinguished university in my city. When she started school, he decided, there and then, that he was going to go to college too--to encourage her, and maybe, too, to show her that her old man was no slouch in the smarts department.

(Of course, the Staircase Witch knows that one need not have a degree of any sort to prove one's mental mettle, and that many degrees are utterly worthless for this purpose.)

Anyhow: he was my best and favorite student. And he took a full load. I don't know how he did it. I don't think he slept. It was a little scary. Other students whined about the reading and tried to fake their way through it during class discussion; he showed me copious notes. I asked for five pages, he gave me ten (which I made him cut down to five, explaining that sometimes brevity was a requirement, but I was still impressed). English was his second language and he was always, always trying to improve it. He was diligent, he had perfect attendance, and he was a really, really nice fellow. And afterwards, when my self-satisfied whitebread nineteen-year-olds from their comfortable suburban homes who'd never done more than earn CD money working part-time at the Dairy Queen whined about the hardship of juggling three whole classes during a semester, I'd always bring up the subject of Joaquin.

Joaquin is the person of whom the anti-immigration people are most afraid. I think it's because they are more like the comfortable, socialist French they despise than they would like to believe. They have grown complacent, obese, lazy, self-entitled. They want the good life, without work: their hideous, vinyl-sided McMansions, their fully-equipped minivans, their flat-screen TVs, their effortless sinecures. Joaquin wants to work. He wants to prove himself to us; he wants to prove that, dammit, despite being forty-seven and having done minimum-wage work all his life, he's just as smart as us, and even smarter. He is full of hope and pride and determination for his children. He is the engine of the American economy, and has always been.

My ancestors were immigrants. On my father's side, they were on the run from the Puritans, and they settled calmly in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and built farms and sent a son to a college in Massachusetts to become a clergyman. They were shunned by their neighbors. Oh, later they would make money and have university buildings named after them and so forth, and a great-great-great-granddaughter might be approached to join the DAR (which she would decline) but they were still immigrants.

On my mother's side, they were also immigrants, but more recent. They were refugees from another third-world country broken by civil unrest--dark-haired, fair-skinned, and blue-eyed. My grandmother was a beautiful girl full of tuberculosis and despair. Barefoot she and her sister walked to school, pelted by clods of dirt and howls of "little black Irish bitches!" My mother, full of remembrance and bitterness, would send me to school on St. Patrick's Day in an orange turtleneck. The descendants of their blond-haired, German-surnamed tormentors would ridicule me for not wearing green. "Aren't you Irish?" they would gape. Silly idiots, who were not, would never know what it was like to be other, to be sub-other: there were two kinds of Irish, and we were the orange kind.

Last year X and I visited the deserted cities of those who were here first. We wandered through the restored rooms and kivas and wondered at the beauty of their geometric complexity. We walked desolate miles of sage and Mormon tea to a sheltered overhang where someone had watched the supernova of 1066 and carved its memory into the overhang of the cliff. We sat there in the cool shade of the cliff and pondered that they had believed in their own permanence, as did we, and in that faith and in the determination to be permanent lay the seeds of their destruction. When had the panic begun? When had the broad, expansive plazas been replaced by fortresses and lookout towers? When had largesse been replaced by petty hoarding? When did corruption at the top turn those farther down against one another, the have-littles against the have-lesses? When were they forced to turn away altogether from that beautiful, remote, violent phenomenon in the sky forever? When did the last astronomer wander away, the last artist starve? When was beauty finally killed by self-preservation?

Oh, silly, silly people who think that a wall will keep out the immigrants, the Joaquins who are our salvation. Silly people, who think that they can cheat death by denying life to others, to whom beauty and civilization and dignity are rendered utterly invisible by fear and greed. Our time will come, and you will disappear whimpering and scrabbling into the night to be contemplated by a remote culture who will shake its head at your petty territoriality as it defends its own.

a price above rubies

Yesterday I read a profile of Caitlin Flanagan in Elle. It is brilliant and scathing, and Laurie Anderson showed great presence of mind where a lesser writer might have broken down and never been able to complete such an assignment.

Flanagan is the sort of woman who has always made my head hurt, because she began her essays in the Atlantic by sounding so articulately sensible and well-attuned to the crises of the well-educated, middle-to-upper-middle-class woman. And then the contradictions and reversals began, slowly at first, and then spiraling more and more sharply downward. Was it that I, unrepentant feminist, was simply having trouble accepting her carefully-reasoned conclusions because of my own stubbornness? Was it that I simply wasn't intelligent enough to grasp her argument? Why did I leave her essays feeling as though she were trying to pull out the rug from under me?

Because, apparently, she was. And she wasn't.

It appears that Caitlin Flanagan is something of a fraud. Those early essays about the comforts of housework, the rightness of being at home and not allowing some other person to care for one's children, the blessings, after all is said and done, of being the less dominant spouse and the relief that ensued? Well, she apparently has a difficult time living up to her own standards (or down to them, if you consider her amusement about women who dislike clutter). Her house is impeccable, but not because she does her own housework: no, she has a housekeeper for that. And the cooking. And, if you can believe it, a "personal organizer." And while it's true that she is at home with her sons, she is still holding down a rather healthy writing career. And her children had a nanny for the first three years of their lives. (She insists that she was always there "to exert influence" over them, but I wonder who was doing the dirty work?)

There's really no reason to begrudge her any of these things, except that, as one of the few women writing in the mainstream about the private sphere, her perspective is entirely disingenuous. She has made almost none of the sacrifices that she expects other women to make, and at the same time deals a coupe-de-grace to women who do have careers and don't have those privileges. Make sure you read all the way to the end, about the gerbil, and you'll see what I mean.

And while she appears entirely concerned and sympathetic, she really isn't interested in helping other women achieve what she has: namely, a job and a life that allows her the flexibility to make a name for herself while watching her sons grow up. It could be because it simply hasn't occurred to her; as a "contrarian," her job is to judge, not to empower. It could be because she actually doesn't know how to go about it--apparently she despises housework as she despises the career women who attempt to do everything and end up doing it imperfectly--and she does not know how to cook--doesn't even know, according to Anderson, how much the ingredients in her refrigerator cost. She is, in this respect, what more outspokenly feminist bloggers than I would call a "tool of the patriarchy," and a seductively insidious one at that.

It could also be because she's afraid that someone else will do what she cannot.

Women on both sides of the divide bewail the conventional wisdom that "we can't have it all." What, exactly, is "all"? Perfect children, a perfect house, a perfectly organized life, a perfect marriage, a brilliant career, a social life, etc., etc. I'm not sure what "perfect" is, exactly. I know I'll never "have it all," because in order to preserve my loving marriage I gave in on the question of children. My husband doesn't want them. I long for them from time to time, but have found that I can live without them as well. Perhaps the corollary of that is that we don't have such a perfect marriage, either, since we've agreed to disagree on such an essential issue, and I'll always carry that loss with me. But if I didn't love my husband so much, if he didn't love me so much, I would have left him long ago for a man willing to be a father to my children, and that is always an unknown quantity. And I love our life together. The decision was not hard to make. And he's aware of what I've given up, and he's tried to make it up to me in every way possible.

And since then, we've noticed that other people our age, friends and colleagues with children, seem to be barely holding it together, even those who are quite successful professionally with wives at home in something akin to Caitlin Flanagan's position. And Flanagan herself seems unwilling to acknowledge that the dissatisfaction her mother experienced as a model housewife, which led her to work--is the same dissatisfaction that caused Betty Friedan--whom both she and her mother derided--to write The Feminine Mystique. There is, apparently, some discontent for many--not all--women who choose a subordinate position in a traditional marriage.

And, sadly, that kind of marriage appears to be based on an economy with which those of us in more-or-less equal-partnership-type marriages are not all that familiar: in exchange for security, financial well-being, and protection of herself and her children, the traditional wife feels she must be a professional housekeeper and childcare giver. But she also seems to be implying that her husband loves her because she is a traditional wife. Flanagan describes how her husband took care of her when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and undergoing radiation treatments and chemotherapy:

"When I couldn't walk from the car to the doctor's office, [my husband] carried me. And if that's a traditional marriage I'll take it. If marriage is like a bank account, filled not only with affection but also with a commitment to the other person's well-being as much as to one's own, I suppose my balance was high. I suppose that all the days I had made a home for my husband, and all the times I had ended my writing days early so that he could work late or come home to a hot dinner and not a scene of domestic chaos -- all that, as much as the desire and intensity that originally brought us together, were stores in my account."

Love as a bank account. That made my blood run cold, as it did many other readers. One Salon reader pointed out that when a spouse has cancer, you drop everything and care for that person. Not because they've made you hot meals in the past, although that might be an expression of their love for you, but because you love them simply can't live without them, regardless of how much domestic chaos there has been in the past. (And since the hot meals, these days, are made by someone else, there must be some intangible reason Flanagan's husband keeps her around, even if she refuses to acknowledge it.) Equal partnership marriages are much more familiar with the give-and-take aspect than are traditional marriages, I think, because when one spouse--male or female--needs to slack off, the other can step in, rather interchangeably, without any need for expressions of guilt or gratitude.

So although there were points at which the essay on Flanagan angered me deeply, particularly on behalf of the writer, I came away with a feeling of overwhelming sadness. Flanagan, too, wants it all, and she's discovering that she has fallen short.

I have more to say on the subject, and it relates to what I want to do with this blog--something I really haven't found anywhere else.

In which I continue to flout the laws of effective blogging

It's been a whole week since my last entry. I feel such a failure. I should be blogging every day, or two or three times a day. Give that rat its jellybean.

Oh, there was a point where I seriously thought about making a post, but simply didn't have the time to do so. Even now, I feel that I am taking time away from something important that I am avoiding, but I wanted to capture this moment of simultaneous contentment and restlessness.

Contentment: the scent of free-range chicken from a local farmer, cooking slowly with lemon, garlic, and vermouth, is in my nostrils. Around nine--we eat late, partly because I want to watch Bleak House in peace--I will braise radicchio and ricotta to serve with it, as well as a nice inexpensive rose. My white cat perches on the chair behind me, such a baby, despite his ten years. My calico darling sits on the arm of my chair, bewitching me with her adorable soft kittenness. My orange tabby--the Old Woman, the Alpha Female, still beautiful and fearsome--lounges on the back of the sofa, behind my beloved husband. Outside, snow falls. I type all this in a pleasant haze borne of the consumption of two G&Ts.

Restlessness: about ten minutes ago, I crept up behind my handsome brilliant husband and pulled his head back and kissed him passionately on the lips. He is in the midst of preparing tomorrow's lecture for his graduate seminar. He returned my affection with stiff, tolerant lips. "You kiss like a book," I murmured, and though I doubt he caught the reference, the criticism stung somewhat. Oh, my darling, I want to be with you somewhere beyond the reach of students, NSF, DOE, the need for tenure...somewhere where all those things are in suspension, and you and I are all that matter, and I can drown in my desire for you. I want you to devour me. You tell me that all you want, ever, is to be with me, and yet, so many mundane things intrude upon our life together.

Let me describe this man for you: he is tall, gangly, bifocaled, but his piercing blue eyes crinkle kindly behind thick lenses. He smells of Old Spice and clean laundry. His humor is boyish. He is deeply intelligent but unsure of himself. He is a kind and sympathetic master to his apprentices, his graduate students. In 1996, when Carl Sagan succumbed to cancer, he wept. He is kind and loving to small children and animals and has a faithful following among both. He cherishes me like a fragile, treasured heirloom.

Herein, preliminary noises about the daunting nature of a blank page and an empty post.

Or, rather, as dear Mr. Thomas would have said, " To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black." Which I like much better as an introduction than "It was a dark and stormy night."

It is not spring, although the bulbs outside my house have been fooled into believing that it is. Last week I noticed, rather with horror, that tiny green shoots are erupting from the ground where my King Alfreds are planted. On Friday we had a gorgeous thunderstorm, which I would have relished if it had been March instead of the end of January, but instead sat inside my office looking out with a cup of soy chai latte and lamenting the fact that it was probably too late to cover my fragile new plants with mulch, and probably futile as well.

Now an arctic cold lies over the whole region, and I cannot seem to get warm. I am sitting in the armchair in my husband's study (to get me to stay and keep him company, he sweetly tucked me in with a blanket, put a cat on my legs, and brought me a cup of tea) and trying, awkwardly, to begin again on a blog whose title is based on a silly, private sort of mondegreen.

You have heard of what the French call l'esprit d'escalier--"the wit of the staircase"--that absolutely perfectly brilliant retort that comes to mind after one has left the party and is ascending to one's room--but you have never heard of the "witch of the staircase," that beguiling, mischievous enchantress who secretly ties one's tongue and does not loosen it until clever repartee is no longer of use. Somewhere along the way, as a child, I misheard this phrase, and although soon enough corrected was disappointed that no such magical lady existed.

Once upon a time, I had another online diary, in another place, and it was a different kind of blog, one that has grown so unwieldy over time that I've grown tired of keeping it and would like to start again, somewhat more anonymously, building a different sort of circle, writing different kinds of posts, posts that are somewhat more careful and thoughtful. This is the blog I should have kept, with the things I should have written. Because the witch of the staircase is nothing if not all about second chances at wit, even if only for an audience of one.

Who am I? A thirty-something creative professional, married to a scientist. I was born and educated on the East Coast; graduated from college, married my sweetheart who was embarking on graduate school at a large, distinguished Midwestern research university. I also went to graduate school for a time and obtained a couple of advanced degrees in literature before becoming bored and deciding to do something else, which I do now, and quite happily. We live in a large house in a small but relatively civilized university community somewhere in the Midwest. I doubt I'll ever want to move back East; I don't especially miss it, although I do travel home twice a year to visit my mother, siblings, and nieces.

That's pretty much all you need to know about me for right now, although I'm sure I will disclose more--deliberately and inadvertently, in future posts. Whether anyone is actually listening...