Nuance. Pass it On.

Chances are, you made a new year's resolution about money. I didn't, mostly because I didn't make

resolutions, because I'm in a constant state of struggling with improvement. New Year's Day isn't going to magically make me want to go on a diet, nor is it going to make me suddenly realize that I need to exercise. It is going to shine a spotlight on spending, because coming out of the Christmas season, it's pretty clear when you have been spending too much.

I am always spending too much. None of it is lavish. What do I consider lavish? Shoes that are over $100, luxury hotels, wine that's more than $25 a bottle. Some of what I spend is necessity, groceries, household items. Some of it isn't. We all have iPhones. Is that lavish? Maybe. But I have a hard time going backward with technology.

What's bothering me about this is the notion of privilege. Because the word privilege gets tossed around a lot lately. And people get prickly about privilege. No one wants to be privileged. Everyone wants to believe they got what they have because only they worked harder than the person who doesn't have the same thing.

And then I read this blog post from The Feminist Breeder on understanding the nuances of privilege, where the author breaks down what forms privilege takes: beyond the binaries of white / non-white, rich / poor. Truth is, there are many things that might be working to your advantage: race, gender, language, citizenship, class. The trick is not to be a dick about them. To recognize what you've been given, and still, work hard and play fair.

I have advantages. I'm white. I'm not transgendered. I grew up speaking English. I also grew up under the poverty line, in a family where abuse -- physical, mental and substance -- was rampant, and where more than one member struggled, or continues to struggle, with mental illness. The expectations for what I should do with my life were painfully low: they didn't include college. They did include marriage and young motherhood. An hourly-wage job instead of a salaried one. There was a lot of settling. The view was narrow.

Some kids have the whole horizon. A lot of parents pride themselves on telling their children -- especially girls -- that you can be whatever you want to be. If you can dream it, you can be it. No restrictions. This was not my childhood. I was told early that I was not good at math, and that I should consider modest, feminine jobs, like nursing. It was much more important to have something to fall back on. To make a safe plan, and not in the way of making a better living, but in a way that was safe all around. Apply for a job you can get, even if you have shitty grades and a high school diploma. If you do go to school, go for something middle class and stable. Be a teacher, not a professor. Write a column, not a novel.

How did I get here?

Partially, I got lucky. We could have ended up elsewhere. We might have worked lesser jobs, or stayed in jobs where the pay was low. Of course we had advantages. Geoff went back to school for another bachelor's degree in computer science, a move that opened many doors. Are there setbacks? Of course. We spent so many years making just enough money to be approved for credit cards, but not pay them off, that we are still crushed under the weight of that debt. We still live paycheck to paycheck. In between, we dip below zero. We don't have a savings account. You read that right: no savings account. We have a moderate house that costs us too much because we've never had money to put down on a house, because we are always paying off credit card and student loan debt. It's a cycle.

Last spring, I decided to not teach again in the fall. At the time, I was teaching a 2/2 load at Utica College, on campus two days a week, and working, honestly, with prep and grading, four days a week. It earned me a whopping $11,000 for the entire academic year. So I quit. I have the privilege of quitting. Do I miss the little paychecks every two weeks? I do. Because when you're below zero, even a small check helps.

Here's the thing. Lately, I've been acutely aware of others' hardships. I can pay my mortgage. No one is disconnecting my utilities or repossessing my car. The bills are paid on time. There's food in the fridge.

What bothers me is the lack of nuance. The assumption that this is what money looks like. The notion

that I can (and will) spare $100. (When the truth of this is that I will spare the $100, because not sparing it is painful to me when someone needs it.) It's the casual way in which someone mentions, I want money, when they look at our house. Or the way someone refers to Geoff as Mr. Big Money.

None of this is binary.

As Gina Crossley-Corcoran points out, "recognizing privilege simply means being aware that some people have to work much harder just to experience the things you take for granted." In some ways, we are the people who had to work harder. In some ways, we're not. But in most ways, I'm not taking anything for granted. I get it. Both Geoff and I have experienced hardship first hand. Both of us spent time on food stamps or welfare. College was not a given for either one of us. And yes, it was easier for us to break out of the patterns of the working poor. In some cases, because of the advantages we were simply born with.

My point: no one is served by a binary system that simply categorizes people into classes of privileged or not. A nuanced version of it, what Crossley-Corcoran calls intersectionality -- where you might recognize someone as more than just one goddamn thing -- probably prevents anyone from being a dick about it. Maybe it's better if we see and acknowledge the struggles behind anyone's current situation. To recognize that even if you are privileged in one way, there are other ways in which you might not be. Maybe we shouldn't rely so much on a quick surface judgement.

Just me, shopping on a regular Tuesday.

I spend a lot of time jokingly playing into the binaries. Agreeing that yes, since I'm not teaching a dead-end, low-paying adjunct job anymore, all I do is lie around and eat chocolates. That I'm driving a luxury car, and not simply a mid-range sedan. It all goes down easier than me being defensive. 

But I'm tired of it. I'm tired of apologizing for having a husband with a high-skill job that pays well, just like I'm tired of always running out of money. I'm tired of paying off credit card debt from fifteen years ago, and still paying on student loans. I'm tired of assumptions.

Probably, a lack of nuanced understanding is everything that's wrong with how we treat each other as people. No one wants to be pigeon-holed as one thing: old, poor, fat, or even white, middle class, or educated. And if that's all you're willing to see about me, then as my dad used to say, You don't know who I really am.

The Girl with the Most Cake: Some Issues with Weight

There were several cover concepts for The Conjurer before we decided on the character Dorothea from the title story. At the end of that story, Dorothea takes her dress off and walks into a field naked while a photographer takes photos of her from behind. I wanted a woman like her: young, but round, with long, brown hair.

The Three (totally fucking fat) Graces

There was a joke that if we couldn't find the right stock photo, or the right model, I would have to put my own ass on the cover. I'm not right for it. I don't have Dorothea's long brown hair, and I'm not as young. She's twenty-six. I'm forty. Her skin has something mine no longer has. An elasticity and shine. But whether or not I was round enough was not up for debate. In fact, someone, in the discussion, used the word Rubenesque.

I went back to my hotel room and googled Rubens paintings. In my head I thought of other ways I  might describe my own body: vintage, pin up, French nude. Rubenesque? I thought. That's fucking fat.

I have weight issues. I've had them a long time, and probably the only thing that predates them are my hair issues, which started at -- no joke -- birth.*

College grad 1995. Not fucking fat.

I've never been really fat. I've also never been really thin, although I've been lean. When I was a
teenager, my parents had me record my weight every day. Because of this careful tracking, I can tell you that I weighed somewhere between 125 and 135 for all of junior high and high school. I'm five foot four. That's not fat. That's pretty average. I stayed under 140 all through college.

Here's what I know about weight. You can try to persuade me otherwise, but it's what I've witnessed. If you've always been thin, never struggled, people like you, and they secretly resent you. If you've been average to plump and have to work at getting thin, and then get thin -- people resent you. In fact, people will tell you things like, Don't

2005. Totally fucking thin.

get too thin! Or, oh, you're too skinny now. When you gain the weight back, people are secretly happy. Unless they haven't seen you in years. These people remember you as thin, and when they see you, the weight hangs there like a weird cloud. Oh, she's fat now. If you're really heavy, people worry about your health, and don't think at all about your looks, and when you lose weight, they're supportive, and they cheer you on, but not because they ever think you will actually look good.

Harsh? Maybe. People are harsh.

I gained weight after my dad died and I moved to Clinton. Before that, I'd been on the South Beach Diet; I was going to the gym three or more days a week. I weighed somewhere between 125 and 130 at my thinnest, and I had lean muscle. I was thirty-two, and I had youth and metabolism on my side. I didn't gain weight all at once. I gained it slowly -- the way people do when they stop going to the gym as often, when they stop caring about whether or not they have pizza, or a sandwich, or a cookie, when you spend days at a desk, or on a couch, or in a bed, convincing yourself that you can keep going, can keep doing anything at all. 

Probably things stem back to an event. I used to tell people I started drinking when my brother went to jail. I could say that I got fat after my dad died. We moved within days of the funeral. I sent my youngest to kindergarten, and my oldest to middle school, where they knew no one. We didn't have a place to live yet; we stayed with relatives until our apartment was ready. Our house was sold. We lived somewhere else now. It took my five years to gain all this weight. Just like it took me all of my thirties to develop a drinking habit.

What I don't like about  my body isn't its size. I love women's bodies, especially when they are round.

Katya Zharkova

What I'm carrying with me isn't just the weight of fat: it's the weight of grief, or struggle. Stress, anxiety, anger. It doesn't feel like who I am. It holds me back. At my worst, I think it's all people see. At my real worst, it's all I see.

I would like to drop pounds off the side of a bridge, where they would either sink like rocks into the creek, or fly away like sudden sparrows, a dip, and then flight.

I will more likely churn them off, sweating. Trying not to cry.

The first yoga class I took in town (I had done some yoga at home for years), I was in a room full of women, doing really difficult Bikram poses. It was hot, and my muscles felt used, charged, purposeful. When we went into half tortoise pose, I put my head on my mat and burst into tears. What is happening? I thought. Oh my God, don't do this here. It was within weeks of our move. I held it in. I got it together. I stood up, and did some beautiful backbends.**

It's still there. Inside. All that shit I swallowed or didn't exhale, or didn't cry out, or even say to anyone. And now it's gathered around my middle. Where I hate it.

This is not me. I don't know where I went.


*Another blog, another day. I can't get through too many issues at once.
** Turns out, this is a pretty normal reaction during yoga.

Straight out of My Own Bones: Some Thoughts on The Bell Jar

It's the 50th anniversary of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Here, in honor, is an essay I posted at the Downtown Writer's Center's blog a couple of years ago.

 

A few years ago, I outlived Sylvia Plath. And somehow, despite an aborted attempt at a PhD in American Studies, and a robust American poetry course as an undergrad, I'd read a lot of Plath's poems, but I'd never read The Bell Jar. Until this week. I read the whole thing on Monday. I haven't read an entire book in a day since high school, when I read all of The Great Gatsby in one sitting.

Why didn't I read it before? I think because no one takes it seriously. It's sort of that memoir-disguised-as-novel written specifically for college girls who cut their wrists for attention. Right?

In her introduction to the 1997 edition, Frances McCullough writes that if Sylvia Plath had lived, “it's hard to say whether … the novel would ever have been published in this country.” McCullough goes on to question what might have happened if Plath had written more novels, better novels. Would she have returned to her first novel, The Bell Jar, and thought differently? Would she have self-censored? Told less of the truth? Crafted the truth into something less raw? Something dulled at the edges, or as Wordsworth says, recollected in traquility?

We'll never know. As McCullough says, “of course Plath did die a tragic death at the age of thirty, and the book's subsequent history has everything to do with that fact.” By which she means that Plath's suicide makes the book a cult favorite, but she also means that if Plath didn't die, the book might never have seen the light of day – because it's not very good. Right?

I was surprised. It's not the best book I've ever read. The plot – maybe because it's so true – feels predictable. The ending feels a little like a a Lifetime Movie. But, as McCullough points out, “her voice has such intensity, such a direct edge to it,” it forgives the structural flaws.
  

Take the opening lines:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers – goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive along all your nerves.

And she never lets you go. It's a close, tunnel-vision narrative, right out of the eye-sockets of Esther Greenwood. And that voice never waivers.

It's not The Kite Runner. It's not a globally significant narrative. In fact, it doesn't stray very far from the geography, class or political background that it knows. So why does it matter? Why did it ever matter? Because one college educated white girl from New England was depressed one year and wanted to get it off her chest? Wanted to drag you into the eye of the storm?

This is why: because in her marriage negotiations with Buddy Willard, Esther Greenwood stumbles upon this observation:

I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems anymore. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state. 

That's why.  Because more than anything, this book struggles with the notion of either / or. Esther can be a poet or a mother. She can be an editor or a wife. You can pick one fruit off the fig tree, she says, and once you pick one, the rest of them wither and die.
   
What makes it so hard? Why are women prone to second guessing? Can't you do both? Be a mother and a writer? Tell the truth, and tell it hard, unfiltered, like a holy scream*, and do it well? I'm asking you. I've second-guessed my own answer.

You can debate Plath's answer – the suicide answer – the answer No, you can't. And if you try, you won't get out alive. But what you can't ignore here are the questions that Plath asks – about agency, about identity, and about telling the truth without apologizing. Or that what she asks has resonance, regardless of her own solution: Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones. 

*from the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry – the really old, 1972 version I have, which was given to me by poet Barbara Moore. In it, Anne Sexton is listed as still living. In the intro to Sylvia Plath, the editors write “Sylvia Plath's poetry is a document of extremity. Her sensitivity is inordinate, but so is her ability to express it. The result is a holy scream, a splendid agony – beyond sex, beyond delicacy, beyond all but art.”