This is the first time I’ve ever typed that sentence. I
am an artist. It feels strange to do so, even as my fingers rapidly
tap the letters on my keyboard to form the statement. While my intellect
can comprehend this statement, it’s taking a bit longer for my soul to
understand its meaning.

Oddly enough, I’ve never had a problem declaring my former
professions. I am an engineer. I am a lawyer. But then, I’ve
been conditioned to believe that I could be an engineer. Or a
lawyer. Or anything non-artistic.

When I was a child, well-meaning parents and teachers told
me that anything art-related wouldn’t be a realistic profession for me to
follow. “You won’t make any money,” they said. “Besides, you’re
good at math.” Since I was a child, I believed them. I’m not an
artist, I would tell myself. But I’m good at math. When
I was a teenager, I happened to find a report card from kindergarten in my
father’s files. “Karen is excellent at math and English,” the card
said. “However, she does not show an aptitude for art.” See?
I thought to myself as I looked at the document with a sinking heart. I’m
not an artist. But I’m good at math.

Every now and then, I’d test this theory with my
parents. One day, when I was about 15 and our family was living in
Houston, I approached my mother. “Mom,” I said, “I think when I go
to university, I’d like to study architecture.”

“Really?” she replied, amused. Then, she became
more serious. “But architecture requires artistic talent. You’re
not that artistic, honey,” she added gently. She

brightened. “But you’re good at math! Maybe you
could be an engineer, like your father. He’d be so proud.”

Resigned, I enrolled in Texas A&M University, in the
college of civil engineering on an academic scholarship. I became a
structural engineer (as close to architecture as I could get – you know,
without having any artistic talent). By the time I graduated, I had used
every single elective to take architecture classes – 30 credits in all – and I
loved them. I became passionate about art history, purchasing texts over
and above those required for my courses, and read them voraciously. I
began going to museums. I became obsessed.

Predictably, after graduation, I hated every day I worked as
an engineer. The truth was, I found the constant equations and
calculations mind-numbingly boring. This won’t do, I
thought. I need to go to graduate school. I can’t be an engineer
for the rest of my life. However, while I looked around at other
career options, that familiar nagging voice kept whispering: I’m not
an artist. But I have an analytical mind. So instead of exploring
more artistic options, I went to law school. Upon graduation, I practiced
law for 10 years, quite successfully. I can honestly say I truly hated
it. But I did it, all the time resenting the effort it took for me to
make it through the day, and the amount of time it robbed me from my husband
and our new baby daughter, Alex.

Then one day, an opportunity arose for my husband in my
native Trinidad & Tobago, and he approached me about the possibility of
moving. “Would you open to it?” he asked. “You’ve been saying how
miserable you are practicing law. This would give you an opportunity to
spend some time at home with Alex, and figure out what you want to do next.”

I didn’t even
hesitate. I quit my job, and we moved to Trinidad. With my newfound
freedom, I dusted off my camera (a hobby I had begun about 10 years earlier),
and started shooting in earnest. I began writing. People started
purchasing my words and my images. And before I knew it, people didn’t
refer to me as a “lawyer” anymore. I became a “writer” and a
“photographer.”

This transformation has been quite a shock. It’s taken me
all these years to begin to suspect that perhaps, just maybe, I am an artist.
I’m starting to believe in the possibility that it’s not that I’m not artistic
– it’s that my definition of being an “artist” has been far too
narrow. That’s not to say my parents and teachers were necessarily wrong
– I can’t draw anything more complicated than stick figures, or sculpt
anything more intricate than a rudimentary ashtray — but perhaps artistry and
creativity are more than just pastels and moulding clay. It’s about using
your imagination to express yourself – no matter what the medium.

So, I am an artist – despite the fact that I have
been an engineer and a lawyer. I have a mathematical mind, I have an
analytical mind – but I also have an artistic mind. I create
images with my camera, and people respond. I create images with my words,
and people respond. And my fervent hope, in raising my young
daughter, is that I remember to teach her not only can she be whatever she
wants to be, but, even more powerfully, that her talents my lie in unexpected
niches that will allow her to be whatever she desires, or is passionate about.
In the meantime, however, I’m loving exploring my newfound creative side. I
hope the journey never ends.

I am an artist.

Because really,what does that mean? I am a writer.

Everyone writes. When I was a teacher–an adjunct, actually, which
meant that I taught in universities but did not have a full-time,
benefits-and-tenure-included, position–when I was a teacher, my
students were always a little baffled on the first day of class when I
would talk about how this particular course would focus on READING, for
example, or WRITING. Because they were in college, after all, they
could all READ! and WRITE!

But there is more to reading and writing than just putting letters together to form words.

Reading is all about identifying your lenses–what is it about your
own experience that colors the way you see the world, or the way you
experience a text? Does it make a difference to you, for example, that
I am female? That I am white? That I am affluent and educated and
unemployed? Because those things may very well color your reading of my
words.

My students would acknowledge this, grudgingly at first, but then
with more and more enthusiasm. Of course, they would say, different
readers will focus on different parts of a text! It makes perfect
sense. But writing–come on, Ms. Wagner, we can all WRITE. We learned
that in, like, elementary school. Or high school, at the latest (there
was always the one sad student who would say, “But HOW can this be a C
paper? I ALWAYS got As in high school!”).

And I would tell them: because really GOOD writing is about more
than just stringing words together. It is about identifying your
audience and deploying the appropriate rhetorical tactic to win them
over to your side of the argument. It is about identifying common
ground or playing on shared fears or overwhelming them with your
expertise. It is about logos and pathos and ethos!

I was a good teacher of writing. But I never thought of myself as a
writer–I am the one who walked away from my DISSERTATION, for god’s
sake, after three years and two chapters! My husband and I giggled
about our peers–graduate students, at first, and then later our
faculty colleagues–who were a little too quick to identify themselves
as “writers,” primarily in the context of the happy hour meat market.
What did it mean to be a “writer”? It meant you were middle aged and
male and clearly overestimating your attractiveness to young women who,
on another day, might be your students. Or your daughter. To say “I am
a writer” was to acknowledge a certain level of sexual desperation. It
was, frankly, a pickup line (and a bad one, at that).

But then a funny thing happened. I left my beloved teaching job and
had a baby. And then I had another baby. And while I loved my babies (I
still do) and appreciated the luxury of being home with them (I still
do) I began to feel isolated, both physically and intellectually,
because I missed all that reading and writing. And as my first baby
became a little boy, I began to worry that he was different from other
little boys his age and that I was a bad mother, or at least an
unprepared mother. I began to worry that while I could read and write,
I couldn’t raise this child. And so I started to read, everything,
about babies and toddlers and their expected courses of development,
but nothing described my son. And eventually, in a kind of desperation,
I started to write about his differences and I began to feel less
isolated and frustrated, because the writing itself was calming and
rewarding.

And then, without meaning to, I started to write about other things
in my life, like my husband and my other son and my hair, and
THEN,somehow, I started to write about the world at large. And then
my web site was nominated for an award. And another. And then I had
something published in my local paper. And then I was invited to be the
media critic for ANOTHER web site, one with far more traffic than my
little site. And I was writing more and more, and people were
responding to what I wrote, to ALL the things I wrote, even those that
seemed, to me, the most mundane.

But am I really a writer? It’s still hard for me to know. On the one
hand, I am surrounded by people who value intellectual work (by which I
mean work that takes time but does not generate money) and who are
respectful and supportive of all my recent writing ventures. On the
other hand, for practical reasons, I do a substantial amount of my
writing in the bathroom, at night, while my sons are in the bathtub,
and while this may not be the typical picture of How Writers Work
(perched on the lid of the toilet with my iBook on the counter and a
preschooler swimming in the tub), it is effective; my sons are old
enough to play peacefully in the tub without needing to be entertained
but young enough to require constant supervision near water, so SOMEONE
has to be in the bathroom–why shouldn’t I work during the bath? Then
again, much of my writing is about these same children and my life as
their mother, so I suppose there is a certain synchronicity to this
arrangement.

But am I a writer? Am I a writer? Or am I just someone who writes?
And has her writing read by other people? And occasionally earns enough
from the writing to buy a new pair of shoes or pay for dinner in a
nice-ish restaurant? And what, exactly, is the difference?

I don’t really know, but I do know this: last night, when I was
putting my three-year-old to bed, he said, “I need to do some work.”

“Really?” I responded, humoring him. “What work do you need to do? Are you going to make some food in your kitchen?”

“No,” he said, “I’m going to do REAL work.”

“And what would that be?”

“I’m going to type on my computer. You know, REAL work. Like YOU do.”

And for the first time, I had the tiniest sense that yes, maybe what I am doing is REAL work.

Maybe I am a writer.

We are Jennifer Creer and Susan Wagner. We are both English nerds with graduate degrees in English. We both taught literature at some point in our former lives. We are both thirty-something. You will find out more about us as we post, we are sure. Just as we hope to find out more about you. You can contact us at emailinkstains at gmail dot com.
WHAT IS INKSTAINS?

Inkstains is a writing collective that was born out of good writing and a conversation. You will be able to read more about this in our first entries. There are issues we would both like to explore in more depth and more detail. So we have created this space in which to do it.

It is also, ideally, an Internet Coffee-House, in the same tradition as 18th Century Coffee-Houses, which were once the nexus of ideas, exchanges, and dialogue.

MISSION STATEMENT:

1. To foster smart, thoughtful conversation.

2. To promote careful, thoughtful, and excellent writing.
We’d love to hear from you at emailinkstains at gmail dot com.

LAYOUT:

You will see in the titles the words Verso and Recto, the two components of a dialectic. The word Verso denotes an original essay. Recto is a response.

RESPONSES TO ESSAYS:

You will note that we repeatedly use the word “essay” rather than the word “post.” This is beause we regard “posts” as belonging more on personal blogs, and are perhaps shorter, more scattered, more disjointed than “essays.” As part of our mission statement and our hope and intentions in establishing this site, we will be writing pieces, editing them, revising them, and preparing them thoughtfully and carefully.
You will also notice that comments are not allowed on the essays. This is because rather than having short, sometimes nonsensical responses, we hope to foster dialogue and conversation– actual responses that are as thought out and carefully prepared as the original essays themselves.

You are welcome to respond to us via email: emailinkstains at gmail dot com. If you would like to construct a response for publication, please indicate in the subject line of your email: Recto: Name of Essay you are responding to. We may ask you questions about it, or recommend revisions.
We will not consider offensive, insulting, vitriolic, or otherwise inappropriate responses. Or course, we will consider different viewpoints and responses that respectfully disagree with our own thoughts. A good conversation is the staff of life. But anything mean-spirited or rude will simply be ignored.

We will not publish Responses unless we have your real name attached. Even if you make a compelling case for anonymity, we need to know who you are. We will make attempts to verify your identify. Please confine your Responses to 1000 words or less. We will consider really exemplary pieces that exceed this word count, but we may publish such essays as a series, rather than one long, extended piece. You can either compose in a Word document to check your word count, or simply paste it briefly into a Word document and use the word count tool. Please format your Responses this way:

Title of Response, Author Name, Word Count

SUBMISSIONS:

We do not want to dominate these pages with our own ideas and responses over and over again. We have begun the content here with the essays and responses that turned into Inkstains. We hope you will read them and enjoy them, and perhaps be inspired to either respond, or create your own original essays. And we in turn hope to be inspired to respond to your thoughts. That is the way good conversations work.

Please put your real name and your email address on your Submissions. If you need to be anonymous, please make a strong case for it in a brief introductory letter with your Submission. Please paste your Submission into the content of your email rather than sending attachments. Also, please keep your Submissions to 1000 words or less. We will consider really exemplary pieces that exceed this word count, but we may publish such essays as a series, rather than one long, extended piece. You can either compose in a Word document to check your word count, or simply paste it briefly into a Word document and use the word count tool. Please format your Submissions this way:

Title of Submission, Author Name, Word Count

BLOGROLL:

We would love to include you on our blogroll! If you submit a piece to us and we publish it, we will add you to our blogroll. We apologize that there is not sufficient space to include every blog we love there. However, we do, both have significant blogrolls on our personal sites for you to peruse, and we expect our blogroll to grow here as well.
We hope you will join us and enjoy the conversation.

~Jennifer Creer and Susan Wagner

So, you're spending your day idly wondering how in the heck the people
behind the blog called Inkstains ever come up with a such a strange
title for a blog. That's an interesting story. Let me tell you about it:
I was wasting time, traveling in the car, when Jen asked people to try
to help think of names for a new website she was developing.  My
husband and I were driving for a few hours, so we decided to try to
think of some names. I tried to think of anything for a name, but my
imagination was dry. Then I thought of that old television show that is
my current obsession, the New World adaptation of Zorro.
I thought of the episode where the main character is in his hidden
cave, closing the ink pot and replacing the quill on his desk. That
made me think of the movie version of Little Women, with Wynona
Ryder as the main character this time. She was a writer who had
inkstains on her index finger, discovered by Professor Bhaer. Suddenly,
I put the two images from the shows together, and I had a name before I
knew it: Inkstains.

And that's the story.

I am fat. I wear a size 16. Even at my very thinnest, I was a size ten, which I understand is undesirable by Hollywood standards. Apparently a six or a four is acceptable. And my dirty little secret is that, like L., I actually don’t mind the way I look. I still feel sexy at this weight, and I did even when I was a size 20. Being heavy has not changed my relationships with anyone in my life. Which surprised me, because when I was very thin, I thought maybe it would.

The reason I thought this is because my husband clearly thought differently about me when I was thin and then when I had gained weight in my marriage. One year, when we had two small children, he started running and playing tennis and racquetball and lifting weights. He told me finally that he couldn’t sit around and become a fat slob like me. He said, “No man can respect a man with a fat wife. If you don’t lose the weight, I will leave. If you gain more weight, I will leave.”

I will never forget that conversation. We were sitting in the bathroom at two o’clock in the morning. I was sitting on the lid of the toilet, and he was sitting next to the tub. Our sixteen-month son was sitting in the steamy tub, suffering from the croup. Our four-year-old son was asleep in one bedroom, and our three-week old baby was asleep in another.

Yes, that’s right. I was three-weeks postpartum when my husband said those words to me. And the time that he chose to get back into shape? Was when I was pregnant with his third child. I had a total of three C-sections, and I was not even allowed to pick up our middle child, let alone exercise when he sat and said the coldest words I’ve ever heard from someone who was supposed to love me more than anyone.

That was the night I stopped loving him.

Despite the fact that I no longer loved him, I did not want him to leave. So, at six weeks post-partum, I strapped on running shoes and started running. And I started eating only iceberg lettuce with fat-free dressing, and air-popped corn. The weight started to come off. I reached my target weight: The weight he had chosen as acceptable. And then I lost ten more pounds. My collarbones jutted out. I could feel my hip bones sharply. My legs hurt at night because they were so bony, they clunked together. I weighed 125 pounds.

It took me three years after that infamous night to leave my husband. And after I left him, what do you suppose happened? Yes, I started eating. I discovered beer. I stopped running for an hour every night. I started gaining weight. I met the love of my life. I continued gaining weight. I didn’t even realize how much I had gained until I was a size 16. And then I fell into a deep, post-divorce depression and my doctor recommended anti-depressants, and after years of resistance, I finally took them. I went to a size twenty. I started running again. I ate slimfast bars, I ate salads. But the weight did not come off. I have been running five miles per day for almost a year now, and I have gone down two sizes, but it’s coming off slowly.

So, why am I running if I am fine with how I look? Well, because my neighbor asked. I started running, and then I wanted to reduce a little to improve the running. I kept running, and yes, it’s nice to have clothes fit me better. I got married last summer to the love of my life, when I was a size 18. I have had a better relationship, better sex life, more independence, and more self-respect since I gained weight and stopped starving my body.

I saw a counselor at Victim Support Services when I was going through my divorce. She encouraged me to see myself as more than a dress size. Not to attach how much I felt I was worth to that size, that weight. I was horrified. She suggested the size 18 to me, and I was really horrified. Well, whether I meant to or not, I got to that size. And it was okay.

So, I suppose that the strength of my response to MIM’s post stemmed from the fact that it echoed the words my ex-husband used to say to me. That I had an obligation to be thin to guarantee his attraction. Just as L. stated, my own views of what is and is not attractive has shifted as I have grown older. My husband has a paunch, and I love it. I think he is very sexy. And he thinks I am sexy. My ex-husband is very thin, and it makes me cringe that I ever slept with him, let alone that he is the father of my children. MIM does stipulate that a medical condition that prevents weight loss would somehow be acceptable—but why? It wouldn’t guarantee attraction. I run my ass off, but I am still fat. But is that okay since I could be said to be trying?

And I confess that I resent the oversimplification that if someone gains weight that they are depressed and that they must not have very high self-esteem, therefore they warrant some kind of spousal intervention, etc. My self-esteem is just fine. My husband doesn’t like me more because I run; he is happy that I still eat ice cream with him at night. And that I love his paunch. And that I love him. And that I am happy. And my weight has nothing to do with it.

Contact us! emailinkstains at gmail dot com

Author’s note: I am posting this response to my writing, and my response to it, because I think this dialogue needs to be continued. You can read it at its original source here: http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2006/03/25/feminist-blogging/

The thing about blogs is they let people talk about whatever they like. So there are an awful lot of blogs out there about women’s experiences. Sometimes I wonder if this could be used for something more. If the barrier between feminist blogging, which is primarily about other women’s lives, and blogging on ‘women’s topics’ where feminist women (and non-feminist women) write about their lives, could be broken down. What would it look like if feminists who were writing about body image issues and reproduction, linked more to personal stories on weight-loss blogs and mother blogs (and yes it’s scary that those are the two female blogging topics that come to mind) and vice-versa. Because I do think that feminist analysis is stronger the more it links to women’s experience, and I think talking about women’s experience can be something more, it can be consciouness raising.

This is in response to the great ‘false advertising’ debate. I’ve read a lot of posts on this issue. I feel like I understand the issues around the role women’s bodies play in a relationship, particularly in middle-class white America, but I think many of those observations would apply outside that specific context (incidentally I’ve also developed a plan, if I am in a relationship with someone who thinks a change in my appearance is ‘false advertising’ I will simply tell a couple of my female friends about it, and they will take care of him).

But while I know more, I’m still feeling really ambivilant about the debate, because I’m not sure it’s what I’d call feminism. In supposedly feminst blogs and comments women have been attacked for feeling like they owe it to their husbands to keep their weight down. From I Blame the Patriarchy

Regarding said ass: Women of some races naturally have asses like that. Women of some races naturally have hair like that too. But the kid’s white, and both hair and butt look bought to me. Also besides, being as they are both staunch supporters of the patriarchy, I assume she’s read the fine print. As soon as her ass goes south, he’ll have (and probably take) the option to find another, younger butt.

I get it, I really do. I understand the frustration, the desire to get angry at a woman for accepting and perpetuating so much shit. When I read this:

My boyfriend, the man I thought I was going to marry, brok up with me after 4.5 years. Because I gained weight. To be fair, it was a significant gain (about 25 pounds).

I wanted to yell at the woman why the fuck are you being fair to a man who leaves you because you’ve gained 11 kilos? You should be dancing Numfar’s dance of joy that you got out. But I don’t think that that helps build anything, except the idea that I think I’m better than her. And I’m not, I have my own issues, and I don’t write about them on my blog, except with eight layers of feminist analysis. But does that just make me less honest than her?

Despite these ugly personal attacks, there were real benefits from reading so many different perspectives on one issue. One of the things that really disturbed me, and showed how good the patriarchy (still don’t like the term) is at colonising our minds, was that we shouldn’t just want to attain beauty standards to catch a mate, we should want them for ourselves. From a comment on I blame the patriarchy

I’ve met women who have “let themselves go” after marriage out of the idea that they already have their man, so they don’t have to try anymore. To them, the idea of putting any kind of effort into themselves was a tool to get a mate, and once they had the mate, they could stop doing those things. I’m not saying that one has to wear make-up, exercise, whatever to be happy, but it disturbs me greatly to think that I should only care about my appearance to trap a man, and once I’ve got him I can just “let myself go.”

A slightly different version of the same thought on Tertia

It doesn’t matter if you are 10, 15 or 50 pounds heavier than you were when you got married; if you take pride in yourself and dress nicely, do your hair, spray some perfume on, wear pretty earrings etc, you will feel nice and you will look nice. And I am sure that is all that most men want. They want us to like ourselves and to be happy. Because they know, the happier we are within ourselves the sexier we will feel, and that can only mean good things for the long suffering husband. A happy wife makes a happy husband.

Unfortunately, I can’t really have a conversation here about what these women have said, I’d be attacking them, attacking what they said. Informal, unsure conversations, where you learn stuff together – it’s easier to do that in person.

Which is a shame, because the analysis I found most interesting came from blogs that would probably identify more as Mommy blogs than feminist blogs.

Moxie seemed afraid that everyone would hate her when she came to I Blame the Patriarchy, but I thought her analysis was really useful.

I’ve been thinking about this topic all day. The notion that a woman owes it to her husband or her relationship to keep her body thin (or whatever way the culture decides is beautiful–I’m sure there are women in Africa who feel pressure to stay fat) is part of the truth that when a woman gets married her body no longer belongs to her, but instead is the property of and a symbol of the marital unit.

It’s the woman’s responsibility to get and stay pregnant. Even if she gets pregnant easily, she’s the one who takes the entire physical hit of the pregnancy. Heartburn, acne, sciatica, backache, hemorrhoids, varicose veins, PSD, tendonitis, skin tags, stretch marks, insomnia, swelling. And the labor and delivery is a horror, featuring pain and often cutting or tearing, even when it’s relatively easy. Even if a woman loses all the pregnancy weight, her body is never the same. She sacrifices her body for the family unit.

She goes on to explore what happens if a woman can’t conceive and how this changes as the baby gets older. It’s a really good point, and so much more of what so many other writers say makes more sense when it’s put in this context.

I’ve been reading Jody from Raising WEG for a while, I love her analysis and her writing (and freak out at the very thought of triplets).

As Moxie points out far more eloquently than I could, stress and our mental responses to stress affect our eating habits, too. And exercise that comes naturally to single people gets very hard for parents to find. And I’ll also point out that I don’t believe we are our bodies, and that there’s a difference between living well in the body you have, and trying to make your body into something it was, or should be, so that it looks better to other people. It’s been my experience that it’s not any more work to learn to love your body as it becomes.

[….]

Your body isn’t your self. Your relationship with food isn’t your relationship with your body. There are many ways to be attractive, and they don’t remain static over time. And the thinner women in our neighborhood? I’m pretty sure at least two of them are anorexic. Anything is better than an eating disorder.

I’m going to end with my favourite story. The one that makes me think that maybe this sort of conversation is worthwhile. Maybe it will give women strength, and show them that they are not alone. This is Jen Creer from inkstains

The reason I thought this is because my husband clearly thought differently about me when I was thin and then when I had gained weight in my marriage. One year, when we had two small children, he started running and playing tennis and racquetball and lifting weights. He told me finally that he couldn’t sit around and become a fat slob like me. He said, “No man can respect a man with a fat wife. If you don’t lose the weight, I will leave. If you gain more weight, I will leave.”

I will never forget that conversation. We were sitting in the bathroom at two o’clock in the morning. I was sitting on the lid of the toilet, and he was sitting next to the tub. Our sixteen-month son was sitting in the steamy tub, suffering from the croup. Our four-year-old son was asleep in one bedroom, and our three-week old baby was asleep in another.

Yes, that’s right. I was three-weeks postpartum when my husband said those words to me. And the time that he chose to get back into shape? Was when I was pregnant with his third child. I had a total of three C-sections, and I was not even allowed to pick up our middle child, let alone exercise when he sat and said the coldest words I’ve ever heard from someone who was supposed to love me more than anyone.

Ok that’s not happy, but her next sentance was:

That was the night I stopped loving him

There’s more to the story. Awful horrible stuff that makes me furious, but three years later she did leave him.

I do think bringing together different women’s experiences of the same problem can be helpful. I even think this debate is. But without trust, without sisterhood (with all the problems that brings), I’m not sure this is building anything much. I’m worried that it’s just making ‘feminists’ another group of women with special interests and experiences.

Also posted on my blog.

This entry was posted by Maia and is filed under Feminism, sexism, etc, Whatever, Fat, fat and more fat, Families structures, etc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Feminist blogging”

1. emma Writes:
   March 25th, 2006 at 6:21 am You should go with the person who loves you rather than your figure or beauty. The ultimate thing that reamins with you is your behavior, your attitude, your feelings, your emotions and your care. Beauty is just your prime time friend. Who says it is going to be with you always. No, never.

   I would like to prefer the person who loves my inner soul not my short-period beauty.



2. Jen Creer Writes: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
   March 25th, 2006 at 10:36 am Thank you so much! This literally brought me to tears. I am not the same woman who sat in the bathroom that night and endured those words. Sometimes, I actually think of “her” with pity. But I do remember in some ways the crippling feeling of that marriage, the ways I constantly felt that I was clawing for some sense of self the entire time.

   The story of my actual leaving him was simply the most empowering action of my life. I had asked him to leave, and I was punished for it, but I was in graduate school by that time. I was teaching my students liberation pedagogy, so I plunged forward, yelling at him every night for what an asshole he was. Finally, I told him I was taking the kids and moving out. He told me that he thought *we* should *voluntarily* commit me to a mental institution so I could reflect on what I was saying.

   That shook me to my core. But I insisted that I needed to go see a counselor about my anger toward him. He made me an appointment 90 miles away so nobody in town would know what an asshole he was. The counselor told me, after fifteen minutes, to call the women’s shelter. She gave me materials about emotional abuse. My husband was going out of town on a trip the next week. He was taking our oldest son, and that was one of the most paralyzing moments of my life: if he were to find out what I was doing, he might hide my son with his relatives.

   I watched them drive away, then went to the computer and emailed the friend who helped me pack: “I’m ready.”

   Over the next four days, we found an apartment. She and her daughters moved in with me and my three boys and we shared childcare and expenses. I went with my joint credit card, after calling friends to make sure I could, and I bought furniture. I went to Wal-mart and bought six months’ worth of diapers, tylenol, stocked up on other things I knew I would need. Friends from my department came with trucks and vans to move us out. Other friends watched my younger two sons. I didn’t sleep that week, or I don’t remember sleeping very much.

   Two other friends came with me to the house to get my oldest son back, which, at twilight, we were able to do without incident. We first removed my ex-husband’s gun from the house (a .22 rifle, so not terribly scary, but still) and put it in the trunk of their car. I went out and took my sleeping son from the front seat of the truck my husband was driving and walked quickly away from him to the bottom of the driveway, while the presence of my other two friends kept my ex from stopping me. And we drove away.

   That was the beginning of a nearly year long custody battle which culminated on September 11, 2001.

   But I did it. I got out, I got my boys, and I got my life.

   But I tell you all of this because this entire dialogue has been such a source of obsession for me this week because apart from all of the rhetoric that has been pitched about self-esteem and taking care of oneself, underlying that is a very real tendency to reduce women in particular to their cellulite, their ass sizes, their bodies. I have seen the dark underbelly of this argument, which still claims an innocence and pretends to be about empowerment, in the form of women “taking care of themselves” by maintaining a weight. We live in a world that values women only if there is LESS of them. We are encouraged to weigh less, say less, BE LESS.

   Regardless of whether or not women find men who are balding with paunches attractive, men’s power does not lie in their physical appearance, and women’s *should not either*– and that, for me, is the real shame of some of this thinking– because it so clearly still is perceived that way. By women. We still have a long road to hoe.

Let me make one thing clear – I am not fat; by 'fat,' I mean the rotund kind of fat, like the mother in What's Eating Gilbert Grape.
The floor-shaking kind of rotund, the kind where your car lists to the
side when you sit in it. I am over the weight that is healthy for me
tobe at, but I am not fat, either, and neither is the other half of the
population that we're told is overweight.

Let me explain. Two years ago I got sick. It doesn't matter with
what disease or how I got sick, only that I got sick. I lost about ten
pounds
because I couldn't eat… for a month. Then I was on a puree diet, then
a soft diet, then, finally, I could safely eat real food again. Nothing
has ever tasted as good as my first meal of mashed potatoes! I loved
the salt, the butter, the mess of potatoes dribbling down my
chinbecause my tongue just wasn't strong enough at the time to catch it
all…. Wow, was real food ever incredible!

Now, two years later, real food is still incredible. I like the way it tastes, the way it feels in my mouth, the way it smells
while it's cooking…everything. I especially love sweet things -
chocolate, sweet coffee drinks, sweet bread – ice cream, for example,
is totally divine. A friend recently gave me and my husband homemade
coffee flavored ice-cream. We gave her some of my daughter's hand me
down clothes, so
she made the ice cream to thank us. I think I got the better end of
that deal, even though she walked out of my house carrying two garbage
bags full of kids' clothes. Her ice-cream was that good. I would never
have guessed it was homemade.

But, the point is, that I'm eating now, I'm eating a lot, and I'm
enjoying every minute of eating it. When I was sick, I started off ten
pounds under my accepted target weight. Then I gained back those ten
pounds. But I didn't stop there. Soon,
I was twenty pounds over my target weight. Then thirty pounds. I
stopped eating so much to stop gaining weight, because I knew if I was
too heavy to move, it would ultimately make life harder for
me. But it sure was difficult to stop eating so much–everything
tasted so good!

However (and I am trying to make a point here, but I had to give a little history first so that you'll understand where my ideas
are
coming from), I hail from a background where I was taught and firmly
believed that 'thin' was good; being overweight was not. Not
rotund like that mother in What's Eating Gilbert Grape (I love that movie, by the way).

Where did this image of the 'right' kind of 'thin' come from? From magazines,
from TV, from my parents complaining when we were held up by an
overweight person (as if overweight automatically means slow) at a
restaurant or a convenience store. As if we were somehow right and that
person was wrong just by existing. But, what I never really understood
is that the idea we carried about 'thin' was actually what was wrong,
not the person in line in front of us.

I recently saw a photograph of myself right after my daughter was
born.I was so thin, I looked sick. Only, that was before I really
got sick. And, at the time, I thought that I needed to lose weight
because I had
a
tummy that stuck out. Well, you know what? When you're 30-something,
you're supposed to have a tummy, especially if you've had a baby.

I know of a woman who died recently from a disease (doesn't matter
what
disease); she weighed less than 100 pounds when she died, but she still
had cellulite on her thighs… But we're taught that she was 'wrong' to
have that cellulite when actually she was the one who was'right.' You
know why? Because we're supposed to have cellulite on our
thighs. We're designed as humans and as human females (because females
are biologically designed to have babies, not because females are
better or anything) to get bigger as we get older. That's the way it's
supposed to be, not that we should be a 'target' weight. What is a
target weight, anyway? Who decides something that's so personal? Why
should we get so angry about it when we don't hit that perfect little
number on our scale?

The weight loss industry is booming because we have this
preconditioned misconception of the perfect weight for ourselves – an
idea that has been firmly stamped in our minds by TV, magazine
pictures, and books or newspapers. We can't all be as thin as the
models we see on TV or in magazines. The reason why those people are
models, or actors, or actresses in the first place is because they're
so skinny. And have you noticed how young those models or actors and
actresses are? They're young because we're skinny when we're young and
not-so-skinny when we get older. That's the way life is. However, we're
not supposed to know that. We're supposed to buy in to the idea that we
need to be
'thin.' That way, we'll spend tons of money on weight loss products or
programs or diets in the hopes that we'll get skinny, when actually
we're supposed to getting thicker with age, not 'thinner.'
Well, I say 'phooey' to the weight-loss industry and all those
weight-loss companies advertisements. I like food, I enjoy eating it,
and I'm unhappy when I'm denying myself food in the hopes of achieving
what someone else has decided is the correct little number on a scale
for me. What do they know, anyway? It's far better for me to want to
reach a weight that is healthy for me rather than reach an unattainable
and unrealistic idea of 'thinness.' I'd rather be healthy right now
than 'thin,' anyway.

A wooden sign that I saw once in a catalog said it all – and I should buy that sign, because now I stridently agree with its
message…'Life's short – eat cookies!'

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The two and a half years after Charlie was born were incredibly stressful. It is often impossible for me to see, in the moment, just how stressed I am, but in that particular window of my life, I consciously felt overwhelmed all the time. And, without realizing it, I lost a lot of weight. I don’t know how it happened, but in that two years I went from a size I was good with to three sizes smaller and needing a belt. I mean, I KNOW how it happened–it was stress–but I don’t know HOW it happened. Did I just not eat for a year and a half? I have no idea.

An this same time, I decided that I was tired of looking like I just rolled out of bed every day, and I started to shop for things I could wear during my day with the kids that were not made of sweatshirt material. And yes, it was nice to see that very small number in the waistband of these very lovely clothes. But honestly, I didn’t really feel any smaller or thinner. I just felt constantly overwhelmed. Only now, I was nicely dressed.

In the past year, a lot of things have changed in my life. Charlie isn’t a baby any more, which is a huge relief to me; we have learned so much about Henry and how his brain works, which is also a huge relief. Because of these changes, I no longer wake up every single morning and three times at night feeling overwhelmed by my life. All of that is good.

But the down side is this: I have gained back some–like perhaps ten pounds–of the weight that I lost in that crazy period. And while I am genuinely relieved not to feel like I am walking on the thin edge of a razor any more, I am sad about the weight. Not so much because I have a closet full of terrific clothes that I can’t wear, although that does bother me, but because I feel very uncomfortable in my body, and I don’t like that feeling.

I am still a smaller size than I was before I had Henry. I am about two sizes bigger than I was when I had to belt the smallest pants. But I feel like there is a lot of extra to me just now. And I don’t like that feeling.

When we were in Florida, two years ago, my sister-in-law said something about how thin I was, and I remember saying, ‘Yes, but the funny part is, I don’t feel any smaller. I feel like I’m the same size I was the day before Charlie was born. Or the week before I got pregnant with Henry.’ And that was true, then. But now I feel bigger. I am conscious that I have been smaller, and now I’m not. I am conscious that I have been comfortable with myself, and now I’m not. In the years after Charlie was born, I lost part of myself, literally and metaphorically.

Was this change in my weight, in my self, unfair to my husband? Was it “false advertising“? To me, that implies that I intentionally set out to deceive him, that I came into our marriage knowing that being a mother would push me over the edge and wear me thin.

When I was at my thinnest and needed a belt to keep my pants up, people were forever saying–to me, to my husband–how great I looked, how little I was after two babies! But each time I heard this, I felt nervous, as though I were fooling them, because I felt terrible–not pretty or sexy or desireable, just tired and overwhelmed. Fortunately, my husband did no make a big deal–or ANY deal–of my weight; instead, he gave me time away from our children and time with him and time to talk about how hard it was to be the mommy. And because he never made an issue of my weight, it never became an issue, which allowed me to see that there were other issues that I needed to deal with.

My weight is not who I am; the number in the waist of my pants is no reflection on my moral character or my abilities as a mother or my love for my husband. Instead, it is a sign of the patterns of my life, just as it is for so many other women who struggle with their weight. This moment of being uncomfortable in my body isn’t about my body as much as it is about some larger discomfort with my life. I never imagined that I would feel this way about myself; I never could have warned my husband that I would. But I did not sell him a bill of goods by not forseeing this.

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This post is part of the Crazy Hip Blog Mamas collaborative writing project. Go here to read posts from other participating blogs and here to learn more about the CHBM webring.

I’ve been hanging out at Friday Playdate for just over a year now, swilling martinis and admiring my pretty shoes while my children wreak havoc somewhere outside my line of vision. As playdates go, this has been a good one; nothing has been broken and there has been no bloodshed or hurt feelings. More importantly, though, this web site has helped me merge my hip self with my mama self, and has given me an outlet for all the crazy at my house.

Before I became The Mommy, I was an academic, which is just a pretentious term for someone who teaches in a university. More specifically, I was an adjunct, which is another pretentious term for someone who teaches part time in a university and thus has no benefits and no office and no say in departmental policy. But in spite of all that, I loved my life. I spent my days talking about Foucault’s theories of sexuality and the history of the novel and the structure of postmodern narrative. I had the New York Times delivered to my door every single day. I read the book reviews, and then I read the actual books. I taught novels like Schindler’s List and Waterland and The English Patient. I said ‘fuck’ in my lectures, in contextually appropriate ways. I used words like ‘hegemony’ and ‘pedagogy’ and ‘patriarchy’ in everyday conversation. I subscribed to InStyle magazine and had time to read the whole thing. I wore short skirts and funky shoes. I had my hair professionally colored every eight weeks.

But all that time, what I wanted was a baby. It took us a while–not as long as it takes some people, but longer than we expected–to make Henry. And then he was premature, deciding at 34 weeks that he was all done gestating, even though, as Wade told people, he was not yet golden brown on top. He spent ten days in the NICU; when he came home, he had horrible reflux and trouble sleeping and attachment issues. Twenty five months later, I had Charlie, who was full-term and healthy, although by then I had begun to worry about Henry, who seemed somehow off track. The two years after that were grueling, and while I lost the baby weight easily I seemed to have lost my old hip self with it.

So there I was, with a four-year-old who was struggling in school and a two-year-old who wanted to be carried everywhere and a closet full of clothes that were too big and too frumpy. And I still don’t know how it happened, but one day I woke up and realized that I was a Sweatsuit Mommy. I would get up every day, shower, do makeup and hair and jewelry, and then put on my sweats. Yes, sweats! All that work to put on sweats. But not just ANY sweats–the matching Track Suit, with a color-coordinated tank top and athletic shoes that weren’t sturdy enough for any athletic feats more elaborate than pushing a grocery cart. I looked like all the other mommies in the carpool line, which was what I wanted, or thought I wanted. But the more I talked to those other very very nice mommies, the more I realized that I wasn’t like them–they didn’t have to worry about their children running out into traffic or only eating three foods or confusing what was pretend with what was real. They were pleased when George Bush was reelected. They were too busy driving their kids to soccer and gymnastics and Spanish lessons to care who was on this year’s Booker Prize shortlist. And I could tell that they weren’t sure what to make of me either, with my short hair and my own name and my liberal politics.

Eventually, after one too many days sitting in the carpool line reading the New York Times, I realized that what I missed was my mind–I missed thinking and reading and writing, all the things I took for granted when I was teaching. I started reading blogs and then I started writing here and it was a good release, a way to process my days and find the funny in the chaos. Shortly after I started writing, Henry’s teacher asked if we would agree to have him evaluated by the school’s psychologist; we said yes! please! because we knew–we just KNEW–that something wasn’t right. Hearing that someone else had finally recognized what we saw in our son–that he just wasn’t doing what other kids his age were doing, that he just wasn’t fitting in–was a huge relief. I wasn’t a bad parent; there was something else going on. I gave the track suits away and stopped trying to be one of the carpool mommies. Instead, I got out my work clothes–the wool pants and cashmere sweaters I wore to teach–and mixed them up with everyday t-shirts and funky jewelry. And I wrote, more and more, particularly about Henry and his quirkynesses. I thought this merging of the past (my clothes and my reading and writing life) with the present (the testing and the worry and the fears) would make me feel more like my old self.

And I did, to a point; the more I wrote, the less scattered and overwhelmed I felt. But I wasn’t that old self any more; instead, I was the mama, and I was the mama of a child who was unlike any other child I knew. Instead of reading histories of the English novel I was reading about autism and ADHD and behavior modification. Instead of writing about colonialism in the novels of Jane Austen, I wrote about our desperate search for a new school for Henry and our struggles to potty train Charlie. And a funny thing happened: people started to write back, to say that their child was like Henry, that they had been through the same things, that they had this advice or recommended that resource or just wanted me to have their e-mail addresses, in case I needed someone to talk to. It was truly amazing, all these complete strangers reaching out to me, simply because they knew what I was going through and how hard it was.

Without those strangers–who are now my friends, even though I’ve only e-mailed and IM’d with most of them–I would still be searching for some sense of peace and wholeness. Because of them, and because of this web site, I am beginning to feel like a whole thinking person again. I am beginning to feel not like my old, hip academic self, or the crazy mama self that replaced her, but like a crazy hip mama who writes about swilling martinis and wearing pretty shoes.

I had no idea, when I started writing here, that what I would find would be my self. And that this blog would turn into the best playdate ever.

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Oh, I think I surrendered books for magazines during my first son’s first year. But by the time he was 18 months old, I was hiding in the bathroom to read. During his naps, I would sit out on my back steps and read. One of my grad school friends later told me that Emerson wrote that people should not waste the outdoors with reading. I shot back that most likely Emerson didn’t have a sleeping toddler whom he had to out-race, and that Emerson could either go outside OR read anytime he felt like it.
There have been periods of my life in which I thought I could or was supposed to surrender the intellectual part of me, the artist part of me, for my family. Yes, that is archaic, but I was surrounded by an archaic religion and an archaic husband who both sensed that to tell people, women in particular, that they *didn’t* have to choose meant that, of course, people *would* choose, and they wouldn’t choose family.

When I was an undergraduate, a professor told us that if we *really* wanted to be writers, we would have to postpone having families, or perhaps never had them, because we couldn’t fully develop as writers if we had children. The demands on our time would be too great. I scoffed and went ahead and had my babies, and lo and behold, I am still writing. At that time, I thought, “Fine, if I have to choose, I choose life. I must not be an actual writer. I can put this away. I am not one of those people who has no choice. I have a choice, and so here it is.” And I drew my metaphorical line in the sand.

Well, I was wrong. I don’t have a choice. But isn’t that fabulous, because I may not have clawed my way to having children the same way I carved out a writing life for myself. Who knows? The point is that the children aren’t going anywhere, and apparently, neither is the writing life.

But the more I began reading and writing with my children around, the more I craved it. I submitted an essay to Salon.com. It was accepted nearly a year later. They even asked me to apply for a job with them, which I didn’t get. But it was the beginning. And one Spring, I read a really great book. And I realized, as I looked around, that I had absolutely no one to share it with. How far my life has come: My neighbor and I regularly buy books together now so we don’t buy the same ones. We read, we trade, then we go shopping again. We eat books. And they are crap, but we are both capable of reading good books as well. And the point is, we are reading. Constantly. I read somewhere recently that people don’t think that mothers read books. That is both insane and true. Some of us read books. Some of us don’t.
I found myself surrounded by the don’t. And so going back to graduate school became a need. My ex-husband wanted the teaching stipend. I wanted the intellectual stimulation. I wanted to talk about the books I was reading.

And, oh, how I loved graduate school. I felt alive again in ways I hadn’t even known I was dead. We are able to shut off parts of ourselves at a time, but the problem is, even if they don’t atrophy, we don’t realize that parts us are paralyzed until we can suddenly move them again. A professor gave me and my Emersonian friend both Wallace Stevens’ book The Necessary Angels– about poets and poetry! And Dan and I realized that we were both underlining the same passages. I had found a kindred spirit. I had found my people. I have some friends who talk about a funny scene from the television show, “Third Rock From The Sun,” which I never saw. But John Lithgow’s character starts smoking… for the community, and he walks outside to a group of people and raises his arms in an embrace and cried, “My people, my people!”

I have found a very lovely playgroup of people on the internet thanks to my blog. But in these conversations with you, I feel for the first time like I have found my people. And I am very excited, in ways my weary self did not know I still had energy for, about this idea. And about being able to write things like this– this is just the beginning. I construct essays in my head all the time, and have nowhere to put them.

I want somewhere to put them.

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Over the weekend, while the sleet was falling and falling and I was trapped in my house with my family, I did something that I try never to do: I read my local newspaper. As always, the paper aggravated me, specificaly because Saturday’s editorial page included a piece titled What Working Moms Do, by Jennifer James McCollum. I don’t know this woman and have no bones to pick with her personally; instead, I want to think about the way she talks about being a ‘working mom’ and why it irritates me so much.

We are all aware of the ‘Mommy Wars’ if only because the media has stoked the fire with, among other things, stories of career women who gave birth and left work and now wake up every morning wondering if they did the right thing. Recently, the talk has been about ‘opting out‘ and how this is related to my generation’s commitment to the feminist ideals of our foremothers.

In the Mommy Wars, ‘we’ are pitted against ‘them.’ Who are ‘we’? Well, what group do you identify with–working mom, stay home mom, working from home mom? Single mom, married mom, older mom, younger mom? Pick a group, please, because otherwise how will ‘we’ recognize you as one of ‘us’ and not one of ‘them’? And ‘we’ are better than ‘they’ are, in some essential way. My favorite parenting book ever is Jennifer Conlin’s The Perfect Parents Handbook. In in, with a mock seriousness similar to that in Spinal Tap, Conlin asserts that the most important part of being a good parent is identifying your perfect parent group in order that you and your children will associate with the right people. She offers each group tips on maternity fashions, what to name the baby, how to announce the birth, how to chose a preschool, what sports to play, and so on. While Conlin is being funny (and she is, truly, so very funny), her parody works because it strikes at the heart of the Mommy Wars: unless you are part of the ‘right’ group, you are a failure as a parent.

Which brings me back to the essay in the Oklahoman. McCollum, a working mother of two, lists the things working moms do: ‘buy in bulk and wear ugly shoes so they get there quickly and come back faster. . . . file their nails at stoplights and have messy cars full of things like straw wrappers, school papers, missing pacifiers covered in goo and hair, pen caps, empty packets of coffee creamer, bills that needed to [be] mailed two weeks ago and ATM receipts. . . sacrifice their locks for wash-and-wear hair . . . cry when their toddlers crush blush into the bathroom rug. . . melt when, after such episodes, their children say, “You know what, mommy? I shoooore do love you.”‘ And I found myself thinking, okay, but I do all of those things as well. And I am not a ‘working mother.’

Does McCollum really think that, as a stay-home mom, I wear pretty shoes every day? That I have time for weekly manicures or an elaborate hairstyle? That my car is always clean and free of kid junk? That I am not angry when my children destroy my things? That I don’t ‘melt’ when my sons break out the ‘I love you, Mommy’ apology? McCollum seems to be imagining the stay-home mom as some combination of Mary Poppins, Sister Theresa, and Princess Diana. And yes, I would love to be that woman, to have that life. But I don’t, nor do any of the stay-home moms I know.

For McCollum, however, the biggest distinction seems to be that ‘Working moms . . worry, cry and buy’ too much. And again I found myself wondering what precisely made the working mom different from the stay-home mom. Am I doing this wrong? Is not working supposed to free me from worry? From tears? From some sense that a stop at the dollar store just might make up for all the ways I am failing my children? If so, then I am doing a worse job than I feared I was, because not only do I not wear nice shoes most of the time, but I worry and cry more than I ever expected to. But I always assumed that this was because I was a mother, not because I worked or stayed home. ‘All these working moms know the hardest job in the world is being a stay-at-home mom,’ McCollum writes. ‘They wish, sometimes, they could be one.’ I think McCollum has completely missed the point here: the hardest job is not being a stay-at-home mom; the hardest job is being a parent. And what makes it so hard, particularly for women, is this sense that we are not all on the same side, that we are battling it out to see whose job is harder, who is making the most sacrifices, who does this best. To have our side declared the winner of the Mommy Wars.

I am so tired of this rhetoric–that working mothers desperately desire to be home with their children, that stay-home mothers are one step away from saints. I don’t believe either of these things. I think women who work have days where they are relieved to go to work rather than spending the day with a teething or sick or crabby child; I know that women who stay home full time are occasionally (dare I say often?) bored by the company of their beloved offspring. No one can live up to the ideals McCollum holds out in her essay; no one should have to. But we are clearly asked to identify with only one of these groups, and our response to the essay is clearly proscribed: if you are a working mommy, you are supposed to envy those stay-home mommies, and if you stay home you are supposed to pity the women who work. What disturbs me the most, though, is a clear sense that readers are supposed to identify with the working mother, who is knocking herself out and beating herself up in the service of her children, and not with the stay-home mothers, who have probably dropped their kids at Mothers Day Out so they can get their nails done and their hair cut. Because in the Mommy Wars it is always US against THEM, and only one side can win.

This does us all a disservice, not only as mothers but as women, and I wish we had some kind of cultural exit strategy from this conflict. And that is why I am so perpetually grateful to those of you who read and comment here. You are working mothers and stay home mothers and women without any children at all. Some of you are actually not women but men. You don’t all share my worldview or my experiences, but you are kind and sympathetic and able to disagree or offer a differing view with respect and humor. I think the Mommy Wars would be over if we all behaved this way; I think it is reprehensible of media outlets like the Daily Oklahoman to perpetuate this divisive rhetoric. I want to like Jennifer James McCollum, I want to respect her effort to articulate how hard it is to raise children and have a career and balance those things, but I am put off by the idealized picture she has in her mind of what my life as a stay home mother is like. And I think that is so unfortunate.

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