The birth day

Years ago, and well into my seventh month of pregnancy in New York City, it occurred to me one day that, as I would be unable to run from a fast predator, I was lucky not to run into an urban panther. These weekly blogs will consider women's lives from the perspective of one who is now older.

My grandson just had his third birthday. He’s the first of that generation, the child of my son and his partner, who was a bit past her due date three years ago. So my daughter and I went to their place in true clown-car fashion to distract them. We brought games, movies, and conversation to take their minds off what was imminent but not yet happening.

Then labor started, lightly at first, then quite heavily -- and we suddenly were there for the duration. We called the midwife, and three of them arrived, so helpful, so focused, so calming. The contractions were strong and back labor intense. My son worked through every contraction, supporting her stance, massaging her back; it was amazingly beautiful to see. I thought about all those men over the years who were shut out of the labor room and forced to pace the floor by themselves. It seems to me that this is what they should have been doing, should have been allowed to do.

When transition started, it was long and hard. My daughter and I were on the floor below, sending Reiki to the work happening above us. Pushing the baby out took some time, and I heard the laboring mother’s voice, pained, frightened. Sitting on the landing below, concentrating on Reiki, I flashed on Isis -- goddess of motherhood, magic, fertility -- and asked for her help. I felt her arrival.

We knew the moment he was born, because his mother’s voice, which had been distressed, became ecstatic, welcoming him. The midwife said we could come upstairs, and I walked into one of the most wondrous sights I’ve ever seen. On the bed were the three of them: the baby stretched out on his mother’s belly, she leaning against my son, he leaning against the headboard. The room was filled with sweetness.

Once he nursed, I got to hold that sleeping baby as his parents slept, too. This is the start of us, I told him, of our grand relationship -- grandson, grandmother -- nothing like the cliches, the ones about grandparents enjoying the grandchildren and then giving them back to the parents when the fun stops.

This is a profound stage of life. It seems to me that, as grandparents are freed from the responsibilities of parenting and providing a home, we can concentrate on protecting a grandchild’s spirit, nurturing his soul, helping him grow.

Love makes it grand.

Au contraire

Years ago, and well into my seventh month of pregnancy in New York City, it occurred to me one day that, as I would be unable to run from a fast predator, I was lucky not to run into an urban panther. These weekly blogs will consider women's lives from the perspective of one who is now older.

For many years of my life, starting when I was still a girl, I have wondered about the portrayal of women. Much has changed, for which I am grateful and, perhaps, as a moderate second-wave American feminist (the first wave being led by women such as Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony), slightly responsible. It’s been wonderful to witness that heroic and positive female characters have become quite normal in our children’s literature and films.

But, once there were available stories about only two kinds of women -- the virtuous and modest (who often needed to be rescued) and the strong and sexy (who often ruined good men). Or, to use the shortcut, good and evil. As Glinda would say, are you a good witch or a bad witch?

In far too many religions, sexuality is seen as wicked, bestial, and women’s sexuality is the worst; it is the cause of all sin, tempting and leading men to perdition. Women had to be cleansed, kept separate, kept out of sight, for men’s protection. Another reality reversal, no? 

Is control the issue again? Men are distracted by sex -- perhaps the result of making millions of sperm a day, 1,500 a second (no kidding). But that still doesn’t explain how women’s sexuality became synonymous with moral danger and wickedness. Despite that, the “bad” girls were so often more interesting.

Let’s see:  there’s Carmen, whose insistence on freedom marked her as wild, criminal, and got her stabbed to death. But was Carmen evil? It seems to me that she bored easily. That’s not a trait to celebrate, but it’s also not a capital offense.

What about Salome? What if she wasn’t wanton, dissipated, capricious? What if she had been taken as the spoils of war? Such things happened in that part of the world at that time. What if she danced to wreak punishment on some religious fanatic who was calling her mother filthy names and the ruler who dragged them from their home to that place? (Talk about effective; to this day there are Baptists who forbid dancing.)

We know that our sexuality is playful, that girls do, in fact, just want to have fun. And there’s nothing wrong with that. 

Watch out

Years ago, and well into my seventh month of pregnancy in New York City, it occurred to me one day that, as I would be unable to run from a fast predator, I was lucky not to run into an urban panther. These weekly blogs will consider women's lives from the perspective of one who is now older.

In our commercial culture, merchants for decades have been using sex, and by that I mean images of comely women, to sell their products -- from mattresses to car mufflers. And I think the only thing that has drawn marketers away from that blatant and obvious sexual appeal is that women are now making millions of dollars’ worth of buying decisions.

So now, while commercials aimed at men -- for beer, say -- still feature eager-looking young women, advertising seems more varied: now we are shown many other types of women and they don’t all seem to be “looking for a good time” as many a public toilet cubicle would have it.

We are a most visual species and marketers are targeting our visual susceptibility. It seems we all do watch women, in one way or another. Women may watch women to see what’s in style, or for agreement, or to check out the competition. I think I don’t have to go into why men watch women.

But what about the beings being watched? When I was living in New York City, I saw a range of women every day -- secretaries and clerks and executives and doctors and models and students and homeless crazy women. It occurred to me that they all had in common the sense that they were constantly being watched, not because of the individuals they were, but because they had legs and breasts. They had no fault, no merit, no control in the situation. (Really, if I wanted comments on my flanks, I’d enter a 4-H show.)

It seems to me that constantly being watched is not healthy; a woman can never relax. It stands to reason that if one is constantly stared at, she is likely to become self-conscious. I think insane women, the bag ladies who live in the subway or under bridges and carry their worldly possessions with them, are an example of the most extreme reaction to being under such surveillance. In their bag lady form, they at least are their own cause of being stared at. 

I’ve been out of the sexual availability viewing market for some time; it’s one of the advantages of aging. Maybe the situation is better now, maybe women don’t have to steel themselves when walking past a construction site or a group of teenaged boys. Maybe both women’s and men’s attitudes have changed. Maybe the message of today’s women pop singers, for example, who embrace and flaunt their sexuality, is that women can control when they are looked at, can choose.

Wouldn’t it be nice?

Yee-haw!

Years ago, and well into my seventh month of pregnancy in New York City, it occurred to me one day that, as I would be unable to run from a fast predator, I was lucky not to run into an urban panther. These weekly blogs will consider women's lives from the perspective of one who is now older.

Watching my soon-to-be three-year-old grandson reminds me of when his father was that age, and I dressed for the day in sweatpants and high-top Reeboks. My son was “all boy” as a lovely grandmother from Iowa called him, and his son is a duplicate, replica, clone. Those genes did not fall far from the family tree.

It was when I was chasing after my toddler son that I got the idea for a new, life-based spectacle -- I guess today it could be a reality television show -- the mother-and-toddler rodeo!

Here are some of the events:

• Replace the steer wrestling competition with mothers wrestling 18-month-olds to the ground for a diaper change

• Instead of bronco riding, competing mothers would lift squirming two-year-olds off rocking horses, run across to a parked car, and buckle them into car seats

• Calf roping would morph into chasing after three-year-olds across a playground, successfully avoiding moving swings, bouncing balls, and sandbags coming down the slide.

After the tests of physical strength and dexterity, we could have a round of the original “Let’s Make a Deal” -- the challenge that every parent faces multiple times a day with a toddler. (Do you want juice in the blue cup or the green cup? If you put on your socks and shoes, you can ride your tractor.)  Watch the contestants intuit which offer will be acceptable to a cranky toddler, or guess which “no” the child really means, or decide which works better -- bribery or mind control!

Life may be a cabaret, but when you’re raising a toddler it can feel more like a game show.

The mother of invention

Years ago, and well into my seventh month of pregnancy in New York City, it occurred to me one day that, as I would be unable to run from a fast predator, I was lucky not to run into an urban panther. These weekly blogs will consider women's lives from the perspective of one who is now older.

I enjoy solving puzzles. Judging from all the crime solution television shows -- NCIS, Sherlock, CSI, etc. -- I am not alone. We like to follow a trail and make a whole from pieces, from evidence, from clues. I call it making order out of chaos, one of my favorite pastimes.

But there are puzzles that just keep bothering me, the ones in which conventional wisdom is not wise, in which the convention feels wrong. I have long been irked by the condescending phrase “women’s work,” which carries a subtext of insubstantial, not serious, frivolous. It has been applied to any accomplishment in the domestic sphere, traditionally the domain of women.

How did our bunch of primates become civilized? Looking at our early ancestors, which ones would logically have had the greatest stress of survival and therefore the greatest impetus to invent new solutions? It seems to me the physically smaller, the one slowed down by its precious young offspring, would most likely have developed its brain skills, since brawn alone would not suffice. (It still does not.)

For everything living thing on this planet, reproduction and continuation of the species is the ultimate work. Many complex strategies have been developed to this end. I can see the development of language, use of tools, communal aims, growth of ethics and laws -- in short, civilization, the humanization of our species -- as one such strategy.

What exactly has been women’s work? Carrying and nurturing new life, providing food and building a safe home for the young. When did this vital work become trivial? Growing crops and domesticating animals, creating crafts to build clothing and shelter; these all support the protection of children, the continuation of the species. But the demanding work of being a homemaker (the word isn't even in the dictionary) has decreased in status and value, at least in this country, for more than half a century. Why?

We no longer have to pit our minds and muscles against predators. Women no longer have few or no options other than bearing children. Yet for years (rather more than four score and seven) women have been routinely underpaid for their work, even when that work was the equal of a man’s. Women were underpaid in mills, garment factories, and offices for many decades before the Fair Pay Act of 2009 (thank you, Lilly Ledbetter). We can go places and hold jobs our mothers seldom could, but the worth of women’s work -- inside or outside the home -- is not yet recognized as it deserves to be.

Why is this such a difficult puzzle to solve?