Minkgirl Muses

I AM AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF

One of the luxuries I allowed myself when we moved to London was the exorbitantly expensive shipping of four boxes of books. Choosing which books to bring, which to store, and which to give away was my very first moving task, one that I completed with the fortuitous assistance of my friend A. A is a writer herself – a brilliantly imaginative and poetic playwright in fact, so I felt secure in accepting her recommendation on each volume’s fate – “Script Analysis? Boring. Haven’t cracked it since grad school. Chuck it. The Playwright’s Voice? Well that’s important. Put that one in the ‘Take to London’ box.” And so we proceeded shelf by shelf with a miraculous rapidity and confidence that I experienced in no other part of the gruesome packing process.

When the books finally arrived 6 weeks after we did, I was ecstatic. I unpacked them and strew them about the living room (where they still sit as I haven’t managed to procure a bookshelf yet), and I’ve already dipped into the pile quite a few times – Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island has provided a humorous sense of perspective about our adopted culture. Ellen Gilchrist’s book of short stories Light Can Be Both Particle & Wave has been a faithful old friend on my nightstand – one whose characters and phrases I enjoy slipping on like a favorite bathrobe. Peter Brook’s Empty Space is as full of revelation as it was nearly 20 years ago, when I first read it in college.

And last week – due to an impulse that I have forgotten – I picked up Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I also discovered this book in college – probably in a Women’s Studies class. And reading it makes me as angry now as it did then. Ms. Woolf acknowledges simply that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” and then goes on to prove in her slim volume just how impossible achieving these resources has been for her sisters throughout the ages. One could apply her maxim to nearly anything creative that a woman might aspire to: a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to paint, to play the violin, to design buildings, to make theatre.

I guess I picked up the book because the longing for a room of my own has snuck up on me again – a dull unavoidable throb. Even now, in this time of not working, this “sabbatical” time, where I have no responsibilities to the outside world, and am expected by no one to produce anything on any kind of deadline – even now, I barely have enough time to think half the thoughts I want to think, much less make anything creative. When all is said and done, I have about 10 hours a week to myself, 10 hours to spend as I choose. Of course the temptation is huge to get a jump on the laundry, to just pick up the house for a few minutes before I sit down to write (because I think better with less clutter), to take care of those errands that are so hard to get done with Gman in tow, etc. etc. But even when I avoid all domestic temptations and use my time to its best advantage, it still isn’t enough – I’m still racing out the door 10 minutes late to pick up Gman because I wanted to read one more chapter, write one more page, look up one more interesting thing on the internet. And I never get back to any of it. I always think I will, that I’ll come home and sneak back to the computer while Gman is playing, that I’ll make a quick dinner and use the extra time to read just a bit more, write one more email – but it never happens. My thoughts are always left unfinished. My intentions left unfulfilled. It turns out that being a housewife is nearly as time consuming as being a working mother. And of course since I’m not actually producing anything with this time, it’s hard to argue for more time. And how much would it take anyway, before I would feel intellectually and spiritually sated – 20 hours a week, 40 hours, 60 hours? How much solitude, how many moments to look out the 3^rd floor window at the sky and the tree branches flickering, how many hours of reading and writing in my journal would be enough to make me feel fulfilled? I could noodle away a life with introspection and creative musings and internet research. And still never actually make anything.

And that is why I am so angry with Virginia Woolf – why she terrifies me so. Not only does she reproach me with her sheer miraculous creative output – but she also describes in her witty side-ways prose the deep and historical circumscription of women’s lives – how and why it is that we will always achieve less.

“If only Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureships and prizes and scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex…we might have looked forward without undue confidence to a pleasant and honourable lifetime spent in the shelter of one of the liberally endowed professions. We might have been exploring or writing; mooning about the venerable places of the earth; sitting contemplative on the steps of the Parthenon, or going at ten to an office and coming home comfortably at half-past four to write a little poetry. Only, if Mrs. Seton and her like had gone into business at the age of fifteen, there would have been – that was the snag in the argument – no Mary…for, to endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families altogether. Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children – no human being could stand it.”

Okay, now I don’t have thirteen children, and I do recognize that individual women are accomplishing a great deal – I hold as friends a whole slew of women who are doctors, lawyers, teachers, entrepreneurs, scholars and managers of companies. But. Still. As a group, we still do not achieve what men do – mainly because of the baby question, and the simple inescapable fact that someone has to raise the darn things.

“First there are nine months before the baby is born. Then the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are certainly five years spent in playing with the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one. People say too, that human nature takes its shape in the years between one and five. If Mrs. Seton, I said, had been making money, what sort of memories would you have of games and quarrels? What would you have known of Scotland, and its fine air and cakes and all the rest of it? But it is useless to ask these questions, because you would never have come into existence at all.”

Yes, it is useless to ask these questions, to keep protesting – as I have for much of my life – how unfair it is to be a woman. It is a topic that I have endlessly bored Lord Limescale with. It is my favored form of whinging (fabulous British word for whining), and I can’t seem to stop doing it. I know my life is very very good, much better in nearly every way than woman of even one generation ago. But. Still. I cannot stop longing for the space and time (and money) to test my imagination fully, to see what might be possible if I could just sit still long enough and THINK.

Be well.

Labels: Career Anxiety, Creative Process, Creative Women

# posted by Christine Young @ 4:22 AM 1 comments

Last Sunday we went to the Sceance Waa-mee-zum (also known as the Science Museum). This has become a favorite outing. You take the District line from Stamford Brook a pleasant 8 stops to South Kensington, where you alight on an outdoor platform that is perpetually covered in pigeons. After 3 or 4 minutes of the chase-and-scatter routine, it is safe to carry/climb the two short flights to the station lobby, where you can purchase a cheese & onion pasty to fortify you for the 3-block journey to the waa-mee-zum. At the second intersection you are faced with a difficult dilemma.

There are actually two waa-mee-zums to choose from in this location (dinosaurs to the left, bubbles and button-pushing to the right.) Both are housed in gorgeous buildings (one old, one new), and both are miraculously free. If you’ve ever visited Washington D.C., you will have been impressed by the remarkably diverse array of art and culture that is available for free viewing should you feel like interrupting your stroll on the mall. D.C.’s got nothing on London. The number of free waa-mee-zums here is staggering – you’ve got art, culture, science, and obscure topics like the history of the steam engine and the gestation habits of orchids to satisfy your brain and your wallet.

So, on this particular Sunday, we chose the right fork, and headed into a giant building packed with 4 floors of scientific innovation and mystery. We knew we’d made the right choice when upon entering Gman sighed “I looove the waa-mee-zum.” “It’s called a museum, honey.” “Yeah, waa-mee-zum.” After a quick pass through the rocket-ship exhibit, we headed straight down to the basement laboratory. Here Gman joined other intrepid young scientists in testing gravity by dropping plastic beads through a complicated chute system, filling tanks with water and then dumping them to generate electricity, balancing plastic bricks on a fulcrum point, and making bubbles rise in vats of colored oil. I think there is no greater joy than watching children deeply engaged in the serious work of play, as they figure out what makes this old world tick.

Something else I like about the Sceance Waameesum is that it is relatively safe. The kid’s areas are fairly compact and difficult to escape from, so adults can park themselves against an exit wall and have a nice chat, assuming (barring a bit of shoving at the water table) that nothing bad is going to happen for 6 or 7 minutes. I really appreciate these restful moments, the times when I can let down my guard just a little. It also happens when we get together with another family with a toddler, and the adult/kid ratio bumps up to a pleasing 4:2 (I know this is technically the same as 2:1, but somehow it feels like better odds). Constant vigilance has become such a habit that I barely notice it anymore – it seems that I, like all women, have been genetically hardwired to scan the horizon for Huns and the ground for choking hazards.

But the relief I experience when I feel Gman is momentarily safe is so palpable, so sweet, that it often perversely turns my imagination to disaster fantasies (which I don’t normally indulge in), images of me carrying a limp and bloody Gman through burning streets searching for a doctor, a car, water, anything. And usually at some point in this dreadful fantasy, I stop running and look around to survey my options, and when my vision expands I see all the other women all around me carrying their children – some crying, some strangely still – all the other women who would give anything, do anything, promise anything for the tiniest bit of help. And in my mind’s eye, these women are usually wearing head-coverings and dark concealing clothes, these women are Iraqi.

In March 2003, when the US began its bombing campaign in Baghdad, I was on my way to the EXIT Theatre in San Francisco for the dress rehearsal of a play I was directing called (prophetically) A-A-America. It was 6 months before I would become pregnant with Gman, and thoughts of motherhood were pretty far from my mind – I was much more concerned with my artistic life, with my desire for the show to be good, well-reviewed, successful. At about 4:30pm, I stopped at a store on the corner of Eddy & Taylor to buy some water – a store run by two gentlemen of Arab ethnicity – and they were listening to the radio. One of them told me excitedly that the U.S. was going to start bombing Baghdad at 5pm. He sounded excited, happy even. I have no idea what this event meant to him, but he was glued to his radio, waiting, expectant. I collected my water and walked up the street to the theater, tears silently cascading down my cheeks. When I got to the theater, I picked up a paintbrush and started helping others who were already there touching up the set. Someone spoke to me, probably asked if I was ok, but I couldn’t answer. Because my mind was completely flooded with images of Iraqi women - women sitting quietly in dark houses with their children on their laps waiting – waiting for the planes to come and drop bombs on them – waiting to see whether they and their precious children would live through the night.

I have never been able to shake that image – the image of women holding their children and waiting to see what will drop out of the sky on them. It haunts me and hovers right at the edge of my minds eye every time I hear the word “Iraq.” I truly believe that if all men could spend nine grueling months growing, 44 painful hours birthing, and countless years feeding, teaching, and protecting a child, that war would stop. This is not an inventive idea. What I am saying is obvious, so obvious and clichéd even, that it no longer seems possible to fully embrace the truth of it. But it is true that each brown child I see on the nightly news wrapped in a bloody sheet, cradled in his shattered father’s arms, defiantly playful despite being surrounded by piles of rubble and toxic dirt – each of these children is exactly the same as my curly-headed blonde boy with the lithe body and the saucy eyes. Each one is as precious to his or her parents. Each one is as loved. Each one is grieved for with the same explosive intensity that I would spew into the universe if my son was killed or maimed or harmed in anyway.

Why can’t we remember this?

I download podcasts of NPR programs every week – one that I like is Here & Now (weekly news and culture digest produced in Boston.) This week they reported on a strange Congressional Hearing held in mid-April, which was largely uncovered by the media because of the focus on the Virginia Tech shootings. The topic of the hearing was “Extraordinary Rendition in US Counter-Terrorism Policy and its Impact on Transatlantic Relations.” Rendition is the bloodless name given to the policy of seizing terrorist suspects abroad and then extraditing them for interrogation to countries where torture is permissible. Apparently the US has had a “Rendition Program” in place since 1995 (when Clinton was president.)

I heard part of the testimony of Michael Sawyer – former CIA officer in charge of the Bin Laden unit and the one of the original creators of the Rendition Program – speak about his perspective on people who are mistakenly rendered:

Sawyer: “I don’t care what happens to the people who are targeted and rendered…we wouldn’t be operating against them unless they were enemies to the United States…”

Senator: “What about those who were clearly eventually were determined to be innocent.”

Sawyer: “Mistakes are made sir.”

Senator: “It’s just a mistake.”

Sawyer: “If they’re not American, I really don’t care.”

I was taken aback by his unapologetic bluntness. But my next thought was that he is speaking a plain truth – a truth that most of our political and military leaders agree with overtly and which many Americans probably accept secretly. If they’re not American, I really don’t care. What will it take to melt our hearts? How do we overcome this massive failure of empathy to see that Iraqis, and Afghanis, and Iranians, and Pakistanis, and North Koreans are just like us? They want what we want – to put their children to bed each night and be confident that they can keep their promises – “No sweetheart, there’s nothing scary in the night. The night is the same as the day. You’re safe, baby. Go to sleep.”

Be well.

Labels: Community Muses, Mamahood

# posted by Christine Young @ 2:18 AM 3 comments