In America, only sex is sacred

It's hard to live in New York right now. It involves head-shaking. It involves shrugging. It involves heaving yet another sigh at the realization that politicians are unreliable idiots.

Yesterday Eliot Spitzer resigned as governor of New York, after having been elected by 70% of the population on a reformist platform--in other words, he gave people hope. New York has one of the most defective and corrupt state governments in the country, and, after Spitzer's crusader years against corruption while he was attorney general, it wasn't so unreasonable to think his governorship would clean and heal some of the festering sores of backroom deals and corporate strangeholds of our state legislature.

Alas, it was not to be. Instead, we watched his political ambitions going down in flames (with his wife idiotically standing by his side--why don't these women just tell their philandering husbands to shove it?) after a federal wiretap revealed him as a regular customer of a high-priced prostitution ring (incidentally, why a ring? it's set up as a legitimate company, after all).

I'm not outraged about his having hired a prostitute. Outrage should be for the exclusive use of his wife (if she's got any ovaries). I'm pissed off that someone with the potential to do so much good could have been so monumentally stupid, letting his hopeful constituency down because sex felt so much better if you paid over $4000 for it.

Matt Frei, the head correspondent for BBC America, has posted the best comments I've yet seen about this issue, which I won't repeat here. As expected, though, he indicated that the news of a politician hiring a prostitute in Europe would hardly get citizens to raise an eyebrow at their newspapers.

Here, though, at least in New York, it's a different story. There's plenty of shock and disgust, some feigned but much real. And it occurs to me that it's really all about what a society considers sacred. Or individuals.

Me, for example. I couldn't care less about a politician's sex life. But the environment? Tell me that a political figure has OK'd more coal mining or has worked to lower pollution standards for corporations, and I'll see red. I don't care if they've adopted fifteen orphans and paid off the debt of a small African country. The environment is my sacred.

In Europe it would be the health system or--heaven forbid!--trying to chip away at the 4-to-6-week yearly vacations. Those are sacred. I've lived there, I've seen it. In Austria you might find a politician tarred and feathered for messing with their ultra-pure water or installing a nuclear power plant. In France it might be wanting to get rid of nuclear power plants that gets a member of parliament shouted down.

In America it's sex. We have a twisted relationship with sex. We suppress it, ignore it, criminalize it, and do it in seedy hotels, preferably with strangers. Why? We puff ourselves up with indignation at someone taking photos of their own kids--practically babies--running around naked, but slap scantily clad barely pubescent girls on the covers of magazines. Europeans, by the way, are often shocked at the way Americans look at their children as possibly sexual creatures. They run around naked in Europe because they're kids.

In any case, sex always gets Americans up in arms. Politicians can take bribes, trash people's air and drinking water, hand public money to their cronies, and legalize torture. But God forbid they admit to shagging anyone except their legally wedded spouse, and then only in the bedroom, in the approved missionary style, as a release of tension (if they're male) or to procreate (if they're female). We shiver at the thought that anyone in public life might have sex for fun. What a deeply shocking thought. Stop the clocks, pull down the shades. Our children might find out that sex can be enjoyable. Shh.

Chrysalis

Over on the other side of the room, a blue-clad mini-person is gurgling peacefully (for once), safe in the knowledge that I absolutely adore him, and I wonder what kind of person I've become. A mother, yes, but not the kind of mother I thought I'd be.

I spent the first twenty years of life firmly convinced that I never wanted to have children. My mother, for all her fun, child-messy artistic-ness, is one of the most psychologically frightening individuals I have ever met. Especially for a child. I always feared that having children, with the demands they place on people (like me and her) with little patience, would drive me to her end of violent rages and an unceasing fury beating against the world that had never given her everything she wanted.

But now? My son spent a month in intensive care after being born 7 weeks early, and I craved him every moment of it. I crawled into a corner of my bedroom and cried that I didn't deserve him--after all, I'd spent my pregnancy worrying only about myself, about what kind of time I would have for myself after he was born (such a huge issue for an introvert), and whether I would ever have time to work, and whether I would resent him when I didn't. I do resent it, sometimes. But most of the time I don't care. I know I'll get back to my work, which isn't, after all, time-dependent. I sit on my essays for years sometimes before they're ready for publication.

Even when the fat little hobbit drives me to frenzied madness with his crying, I can take a deep breath outside, clutch my hair, come back in, and nurse him until he calms down. I'm not my mother! What a releif! But someone I don't know has emerged from a background, and I'm still prodding around her limits. She appreciates people a little more, since she was so dependent on the kindness of friends during a brutal couple of months. She panics sometimes at the prospect of never having a day to herself again. She hasn't yet thrown the baby out the window, which, as a friend of mine said, automatically makes you a good parent. She snaps at people when she's short on sleep (that's not new). And she's walking a narrow, rickety fence, balancing the hormonal reaction that makes her say she'd do anything for her little boy, give up anything for him; and the repeated statement before her pregnancy that she thought she could only make a good mother if she made her own self (work, fulfillment, human-ness) a priority even over her children. My mother didn't, for all her complete self-absorbtion. She didn't try to make anything for herself, and that fueled her anger. To give this little human a good life, I have to give myself one, too.

To See My Mother

Nero, also known as Little Black Cat, or Trouble, or Miss Query, or Shred-it, will be holding the fort and keeping my books warm. As the most petite of our four cats, she is, of course, Alpha Cat. She likes to hang out on my shoulder while I'm doing dishes (with claws like fishhooks) and sneak into boxes to shred papers.

I'm going to be away for a couple of weeks, visiting my mother and the country of my heart. The country will soothe me, I hope (if not too many vacation-home McMansions have been built in the last year), to counteract the unfortunate fact that my mother will drive me wild.

Mothers ... when someone said that there are only seven plots in the world, I think they forgot to mention that mothers are an entire genre unto their own. My own mother is currently eccentric, brilliant, sometimes a little silly, a hypochondriac, a beautiful writer, a visionary (in that she can "see" the world with the clarity of a Buddha), a guitar and piano player, an artist. She calls herself the Mad Duchess and is working on a musical about the evil benzene ring of oil. All this is an improvement over what she was for most of my life, especially when I was little and always scared of her.

A woman of genius, all her friends knew, and still do. A woman of violence and temper and never-quenched needs for love and affirmation (and financial support), few ever discovered. Those who did, scat. Except for my father, who had his own weak personality and a thwarted view that he had caused her madness; and of course except her children, who had no choice.

My mother was also the one who told me as I was leaving for college, "I hope I've taught you that science and practical disciplines aren't the only areas worth studying." Art matters. Her concern just baffled me, because art -- whether writing, painting, crafts, or reading -- was always dominant in our household. Indeed, despite an innate love for science and mathematics (inherited from my father's side), I went to university seriously crippled in my ability to study them. Everything in my life had always been abstract. What mattered was art. What defined my day-to-day life was my mother's constant redefining of reality to suit what she needed at the moment.

As a little girl, I was always frightened of my mother. Later, I was always angry at her. Now, her frozen inability to take any responsibility for her life frustrates me to no end, especially as it requires hefty financial support from those who have none to spare, and takes an emotional and mental toll on me that I could do without.

Her friends, and even her husband, know little of the personality underneath. They see only her brilliance, and speak, hinting, of the need for her art to be supported (her novel, her musical, her songs). Yes, true, but they are unaware of 30 years of uninhibited support, where every resource poured into her and she did nothing with it but to ask for more. One of the reasons I can't live anywhere near my mother is that my own hesitant pursuit of writing would crumble completely under the proximity to and weight of her needs.

And yet, there is nobody who understands or supports my pursuits like my mother does. Selfish, self-absorbed, needy, draining she may be, but she stimulates my mind in ways no other can. And when my confidence falters (as it does daily), it is her words of "this is most important -- all the other reality is veiling of truth" that make me lift my chin and keep going.

My mother taught me that messiness was good. And not just by letting me paint whatever I felt like as a child (pictures, stencils, walls, furniture ...). A messy life makes you look at the world from odd angles. It makes you see things others don't, and in ways others never can.

This is why I've never attempted to publish my memoir about my mother, my childhood. I haven't yet gotten to the point where I can brushstroke the strengths through the pain and rage and violence and fear. It is not enough to say, "My mother made me appreciate creativity." It will take years before I can wrap my head around, and appreciate, and write about fairly, the worldview she gave me.

This is Nemo. She keeps me company while I rifle through reference books thinking of posts and responses to others' posts at the new blog on grammar and language, The Chocolate Interrobang. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary makes a great cat bed.

Hands off my belly!

It's happened -- the thing I always dreaded most and was forewarned about. My belly has been rubbed without my permission.

It was a friend, a tiny-boned, lithe little Frenchwoman I used to take yoga from. I've tried to detach from her recently because I discovered that she's one of these new-agey health people who started giving far too personal advice about my husband's physical health (there's nothing wrong with him) and my mental and emotional life. She tried to drag me to a meditation class run by a woman who does past life regression. I can't stand that kind of thing. And this weekend, while we hung out at the organic farm (the little hide-out for the few liberals in my area), she rubbed my belly while lecturing me about a book I absolutely have to read on Parageneology. Work that one out.

There is another woman in my regular yoga class who I know would love to feel up my little sproglet, but is too polite to ask. I'm grateful to her.

One thing that made me so ambivalent at the beginning of my pregnancy was the knowledge that the single most private thing in my life, what was going on in my body, was something that the whole world would soon be able to see and comment on. For an introvert, a very private person, it was a horrific prospect.

I'm trying to steel myself to it. To anyone who doesn't know I'm pregnant, I can still hide it if I want (almost six months and I've only gained three pounds?). I live in a place where people tend to thickness, if not chubbiness. And I've started not to mind if strangers do notice and comment, as long as they refrain from telling me how I'm feeling and what I should be doing.

What strikes me as funny is how being pregnant, especially visibly so, has further solidified my position on abortion. (Side note: this position is something I'm going to write about soon, as it's going through some evolutions through experiencing a wanted pregnancy.) My body, my sproglet, me. Hands off me.

Talked out of the bookstore

I've been drummed out of Barnes & Noble. The drumming was performed by a chatty man who wanted to tell me all about his difficult decision about should-he-go-for-a-new-job, and what to do about his weekend beach house, and ...

But I was sitting placidly in a chair, working on an essay, and listening to my little music. My B & N has a second floor with all these huge, cushy chairs clumped in groups of 4 around coffee tables. It's a great place to work or read or nap. I do all of the above.

Or did. This is the third time a random man has started to jabber jabber at me about all sorts of things in his life. My husband thinks they're hitting on me, but they're not. There must be something in my aura that yelps, "Open for business!" It's happened all my life.

The time before that it was a Russian emigre, who lectured me about American food, American lifestyles, how Americans are so dirty and don't know how to cook. That happens all the time, too, people deciding I'm just the individual to try out their fix-the-world ideas on.

But this man went too far. Just over the edge. Can't say how I can tell, just can. And he trampled right all over my delicate introvert sensibilities. He kept interrupting my work (I cannot write if I think someone's going to talk to me at any moment--if I have houseguests, my writing life disappears). He asked for my email address.

He asked where I was from. I told him (heaven help me, I can't lie), and privately choked a moment at the physical grip the Rockies still have on me. God, I miss home. He said, "That's why you're so nice." I thought (sometimes wish I'd said), "No, where I'm from people respond politely when interrupted in a coffee shop because where I'm from the interruptor knows to go away."

A few days later I risked Barnes & Noble again. I hid at a table, away from the cushy chairs, near the used book section. An hour later, he found me, grinned, pulled a chair out as I reluctantly removed my earphones (I can only listen to one of 3 CDs when writing, and bookstores don't play them).

He jabbered. I shrank. Now I can't go back. I'm stuck at home, with so many distractions, like a computer with Internet access. Why why why! In the spirit of Jonathan Rauch, "How interesting. Now please shush."

The Pre-Victorian Blogger

For my birthday yesterday I received a delightful book called Voices from the World of Jane Austen. Among all the authors that I have loved and revered and indulged in, Jane Austen remains the constant favorite for her irrepressible wit and social commentary, heightened by conflicting sometimes with her heartfelt desire to be a moral, just, and good.

I knew, of course, that a woman such as Austen -- in her social position and period -- would have spent a great deal of time writing letters. It was the only mode of communication for people who did not have the money to travel far or frequently, and Austen had a large and scattered family. I read a passage last night that described her and her favorite sister Cassandra corresponding every single day if they were in different places, and I wondered idly of what they wrote about. Bits of Jane's humor infuse her letters, her ability to see the absurdities of others people, but that is the character of the letters. Their content is of course what you'd expect: clothes, social engagements, daily activities, progress on the piano or with a book, changes in fashion, family news ... in short, the very thing that blogs today are made of.

I am new to the blogging world, and have been discovering many excellent blogs (which I prefer to call columns or journals or even diaries in the very old-fashioned sense of the word) and some very tedious ones. It amazes me that people get up every day to tell their friends and strangers the minutia of their lives--activities, thoughts, interactions, trials, annoyances, hobbies, and discoveries--in short, the very things that letter-writers in the pre-telephone age might have composed on a daily basis.

I needn't even go so far back. I think one of the reasons I decided to start a blog is that all my pen-and-paper correspondents have fallen by the wayside. Ten years ago, when I moved overseas, when the Internet was less accessible and the telephone prohibitively pricey, probably my favorite activity was sitting in a coffee shop with blank paper and a nice, fat letter to respond to. I loved writing letters. I still do, in fact. But all my friends gradually stopped responding, many of them switching to email and some disappearing altogether.

For some reason email can't fully replace the sweep of ink across the page for me. My entire tone is different when I write an email, my thoughts less profound and my observations more shallow. The contact is certainly fleeting in a way that it wasn't when I and a correspondent made a commitment to set aside time to write a letter and put a stamp on an envelope. I miss it.

A blog isn't the perfect medium for me, either, but it allows a freedom that isn't entirely accessible when writing a different email to every person I happen to correspond with. Most of my few entries I have, in fact, started with pen to paper, as I do most of my writing. And, given the lack of people who would ever write letters back to me if I sent them, a blog is an ideal medium for an introvert, where I can muse without engaging in the high-strung jumpiness of modern social contact.

It's nice to think, though, that Jane Austen, despite all she would have deplored in modern life, would probably have adapted to and delighted in this outlet for thought, creativity, and contact with the world both near and far.