• It’s been awhile since I did a Random Thoughts post.   That’s good and bad.  Good because that means I’ve been posting more in depth stuff.  Bad because that means I haven’t been posting five days a week, which is what RT helped me do before.  OH WELLSIES.

• Also, every time I say “It’s been awhile…” I think of the intro to Britney Spears’ “Break the Ice.”

• We (mostly the “me” in that equation with a dose of “grandma” and a reluctant dash of “The Mister”) have started cloth diapering the girls when we are home and either I’m there or my mom is….which is about 70% of the time.  I wanted to do it back before they were born but The Mister was a Negative Nelly about it so I let it go for awhile.  But disposables are wicked expensive, bad for the environment and most of the time don’t really work that well.  I have to say, I have a bit of an addiction now.  It’s easier on their skin, cheaper for us in the long run and we don’t keep ending up with a bunch of diapers the wrong size when the girls grow out of a size or change shape so that one brand doesn’t fit.  I am getting back to my liberal tree hugging roots.

• It’s been about six months, so we were overdue for another Jimmy Hoffa body dig in the Metro Detroit area. Surprise! Nothing to be found and the dig ends.

• Not knowing that ligers could breed (I distinctly remember reading that they couldn’t, but that could be all made up), I was happily surprised to get a post from Smedette telling me that a Liliger–liger and lion combo–was born in Russia.  Since this thing is so wicked rare, it’s bound to be our new dictator. All hail the Liliger Overlord!

• There are times when I just can’t hide how much I disdain a particular situation.  I think it happened today in an open group setting.

• The full Anchorman 2 trailer is out. It looks really good. I always question sequels, but this looks decent.  That combined with this picture of a kitten in a toy car are the only things keeping me from tipping a table over in rage today.

• I have been mentally working on a post about my disdain for Taylor Swift for a few weeks when Feminist Taylor Swift pops up on Twitter (follow her here) and proves what I wanted to say in such a better “show and not tell” kind of way.  Yeah, Taylor is so sweet and wholesome and that makes her a good role model? Try again…she is constantly putting herself in a passive role and then complaining about it later in a way that suggests that she has no autonomy over her own life.  Nope…not gonna work for me. Don’t care if my daughters are pure and wholesome. I care that they are whole people who are seen as such. Run and tell THAT.

• Remember how I was so excited that Arrested Development was coming back and still want to finish the new season but haven’t because of time and because, quite frankly, it’s not as consistent as the old stuff?

• Just because there aren’t as many students on campus doesn’t mean the cafe should forego offering strawberry lemonade.  Don’t they know that it’s like…keeping me going emotionally and such….? I have such little motivation as it is.

What’s on your mind today?

If you haven’t seen or heard it by now, let me just throw it at you and get it out of the way.  Miss Utah USA (part of the Miss USA pageant, which as someone who is friends with a former Miss Michigan can tell you is different than the Miss America pageant circuit…I know way too much) was questioned about gender pay equity during the Miss USA Pageant this weekend.  I find this ironic since Donald Trump owns the pageant and really would rather issues like pay equity just disappear.  Anyhow, the question was simple:

 ”A recent report shows that in 40 percent of American families with children, women are the primary earners, yet they continue to earn less than men. What does this say about society?”

You could answer this question any number of ways that avoids giving an answer that’s too political for the pageant circuit (though, I’d applaud any woman who took this and ran with it) and that gives enough of an answer to move on.  Instead, Miss Utah USA gave the following answer:

“I think we can relate this back to education, and how we are … continuing to try to strive to [epic pause] figure out how to create jobs right now. That is the biggest problem. And I think, especially the men are … um … seen as the leaders of this, and so we need to try to figure out how to create educate better so we can solve this problem. Thank you.”

Say what now?  This makes the maps answer from Miss Teen USA back in 2007 look relatively cogent. At least she talked about maps and the question mentioned maps.

I get that these women are being put on the spot.  But this is nothing new to them.  To get to Miss USA you have been put on the spot at pretty much every turn. So having to answer a loaded question in an evening gown and high heels is something you signed up for and should be able to handle at that level.  And really, all you had to say was “it’s an issue we need to work on.”  Bam. Done and done.

Instead, the lack of an answer gives me two points for fodder:

1.  Pageants are antiquated and should probably go away.

I love Miss Congeniality more than any one person should.  And I think women that do pageants should be celebrated just as much as women who are athletes, activists and more.  But despite knowing someone that I respect that was in the pageant circuit, I am really not a fan of the whole thing.  I can think of far better ways to spend our time and money than fancy dresses, spray tans and swimsuit competitions.  Hell, even Hawaiian Tropic got rid of their competition since the times they-are-a-changin.

It all goes back to the princess culture.  Women are taught as girls that they have a dual role to play: one based on appearances and the other based on keeping up with men in society.  The fact that the very question at issue dealt with this does not surprise me one bit.  We devalue women’s roles as mothers, caregivers, and traditionally female professions such as nursing and teaching.  At the same time, we tell them that they can do anything they want–while we demonize those who do.  Just ask Hillary Clinton what it’s liked to be followed by hecklers asking her to iron their shirts and make her a sandwich…bitch, she’s out there making policy.  Hell, as much as I despise Sarah Palin, she was demonized for being an advocate for mothers.  Both women were constantly ridiculed about appearances in a way that we would think of as idiotic…if we were talking about men.

Pageants take all of these things that keep women working twice as hard for half as much and roll them into one.  You want to make change and be a leader? Great…what do you look like in an evening gown and swimsuit?  The problem isn’t the women involved, its’ the structure that reinforces the idea that women have to be everything at all times, but first and foremost things to look at.

So yeah, a pageant contestant gives a shitty answer and we shouldn’t be surprised.

2.  Here we go bashing women again…

This was a shitty loaded question for a pageant. There is no soundbite that can capture what pay inequity means about society.  This poor woman was set up for failure from the jump.  Speak too forcefully about how it is a bad thing? Feminazi.  Speak too softly?  Conservative whackjob.

There is no appropriate response to this question at a fucking beauty pageant.  I’m sorry.  Let’s all be honest here.  Call it a scholarship competition. Call it a pageant.  Call it a cattle call. Hell, call it Kathmandu.  I don’t care.  There is no possible scenario where this poor woman could have won.  The fact that she’s from Utah and represents some of the most conservatively-minded people when it comes to pay equity and women’s role in society should not be unnoticed here either.  I mean, if your “constituents” are largely Later Day Saints, then yeah…you’re going to have a problem finding the right words to describe societal issues involving pay equity.  I ain’t even mad at this chick for messing up the answer. I just cannot be.

What I’m mad about is the fact that this is even still a damn question…being asked at a pageant no less.

I’m left to wonder if we’re just using this as another way to go LOOK AT THE DUMB GIRL OVER THERE.  I honestly feel bad for this woman.  She probably has a much better answer than that in her head and it wasn’t exactly a great question for the crowd that just loves to hear “WORLD PEACE” over and over again while simultaneously (and in contradictory fashion) thinking “USA! USA!”

Do we really love seeing women twist out there in the wind so much that we’re willing to put them in this spot and then laugh about it the next day?  I mean, gladiator games were brutal in ancient Rome, but in the modern day in age this is just as brutal if not more so.  Good luck finding a job when this is all said and done, Miss Utah USA.

And the fact that this was asked by a woman that is featured on a show that has at it’s heart the portrayal of women in a horrible fucking light…well, duh…just duh.

All in all, it’s still a tough spot to be put in and this poor woman just got thrown out there like a sacrificial lamb for not giving a succinct but in depth answer about an issue that we can’t even agree is an issue as a nation, let alone one for which we can propose solutions.  Sorry if I don’t want to bash her and run away.

And, of course, once again, Donald Trump’s contribution to the world is in the form of asinine things.

This is the official breast versus bottle post that has been rattling around my head for months.  If you’re not interested, I get it…see you Monday.

I’m not a breastfeeding advocate. 

I’m not a formula feeding advocate. 

I’m an advocate for women and their choices.

Since becoming a formula-feeding mom I have had so many eye opening experiences about the mommy wars people talk about.  My first was the war within myself and the way in which I judged people prior to being a mom myself.  But being five months into this journey, it’s important to me to speak up for all of the moms–including the formula feeding moms who are demonized and the breastfeeding moms who are shunned from public view–and speak in one clear voice for those who find themselves somewhere in the middle of it all wondering what in the hell to do.

At least three times in the past two days, different people have posted on forums that I am part of online about how they are having trouble breastfeeding and the immense guilt they feel over it.  And every single time the first thing that comes out of people’s comments is a litany of suggestions that other mothers assume have not been tried.  Lactation consultants. La Leche Leauge.  Lactation cookies.  Fenugreek.  Blessed Thistle.  Howling at the moon.  You name it, it’s been suggested.  And quite honestly, very few of those mothers asked for suggestions…they asked for support.  As someone who has had to make that transition from the world of breastfeeding to the world of formula feeding, the support is hard to find.

I went through my entire pregnancy thinking that my kids would never taste a drop of formula in their lives.  I was told that I had to breastfeed to be a good mother and I was going to be a good mother come hell or high water.  I took a breastfeeding class.  I read books.  I went to websites.  I investigated nursing clothing and accessories.  I was prepared.

Prepared for everything except the fact that my body would not make enough milk to sustain one baby let alone the two I had to feed.

All of us breastfeeding dropouts speak in the same hushed tones in the formula aisle and in the living rooms of our homes.  We start out by bravely telling a fellow mom that breastfeeding “didn’t really work for us” and that we “really tried hard!” and when they say it didn’t work for them either we both let out a huge sigh of relief like we’re talking about the Resistance in occupied France.  Then we commiserate and talk about formula feeding issues and almost always talk about how much guilt we had for being failures.

Listen to me: we are talking about mothers who care enough about their kids to be worried about them and feed them with love yet who feel guilty because they aren’t able to breastfeed.  What kind of world do we live in anyhow?

Stop telling me that in order to be a whole woman or a good mom that I need to breast feed. My self-worth is not contingent upon my breasts.  Never has been.  Never will be. Never should be.  It’s great if you can.  It’s great if you can’t.

Formula feeding has a shady past, no doubt.  It was marketed to drive mothers to spend money they didn’t need to on their kids and women were told that their natural ability to breastfeed was inferior to powder in a can.  That is wrong for so many reasons.  But we’ve swung so far in the opposite direction now that instead of providing new mothers feeding support in general, we’re providing them with a ton of breastfeeding information (not enough actual hands on support, though…I’ll vouch for that) and then demonizing them if they cannot or (gasp!) choose not to breast feed.  Meanwhile, those mothers who aren’t breastfeeding for whatever reason have no idea bout different formulas, different bottles, methods for preparing and cleaning and so on.  I took a day long class on breastfeeding and then there were lactation consultants that came to my room each day at the hospital.  I was not once told about formula and the differences and how to use it properly.  Not once.  I was handed some bottles and told “Oh, it’s Similac month” as the nurse walked out the door.

That was it.  That was the extent of my formula feeding education.

Wow. Thanks?

Now the debate can and should rage on in the medical community about the benefits of breastfeeding and–yes, there are some–benefits of formula feeding for the development of babies.  But here’s what I’ve learned as a purveyor of scientific data and lover of charts and research methods since I had these problems with breastfeeding: the vast majority (at least 75%) of the research out there on breastfeeding and the long term effects on children versus formula feeding are all about correlation and not about causation.  Any first year grad student could point out problems with the study design including but not limited to: sample size, duration of study, confounding variables, family structure, genetics, socioeconomic status and so much more.

Breastfeeding is great. It’s a great way to feed your children and it has many benefits–some of which science has figured out and some of which it can figure out in the future.  But formula feeding has benefits too.  Partners can help.  Mothers can have choices about their bodies.  Mothers can go back to work and not have to worry about having a job that allows for pumping.  And in situations where food allergies and intolerance are an issue for the infant, formula can provide the necessary nutrients in a hypoallergenic package that breast milk sometimes cannot do.

I didn’t take issue with Mayor Bloomberg taking formula gift bags out of the hospitals in New York City before.  I kind of do now.  Because as someone who prepared to exclusively breast feed and then brought home two hungry newborns, we scrambled to make choices about formula and had nothing on hand.  Nothing.  So that gift bag would have made that first day a lot easier on us.  Even if it never got used.

There are also so many women who find breastfeeding repulsive. Who want to hide women away from doing it in public.  To me, that’s just as wrong as making formula feeding moms speak in hushed voices.  We love breasts being in our faces all the time…as long as they’re not being used for what nature’s intended purpose.  How wrong is that? Every time we make a comment about a breastfeeding mom in public, we’re reproducing the misogyny that women are nothing but veiled sex objects and it’s objectionable to see a breast in any other form.  No one is forcing you to look at it just as no one is forcing you to look at my baby’s bottle.  Would I personally prefer to do it somewhere else or under a cover? Sure. Do I think everyone needs to make that choice in all settings?  Not really.

It is hard enough being a mom.  It really is. People say “oh you don’t know until you have kids.”  It’s not that you don’t know it’s hard. I think all people recognize that.  They just don’t get what parts of it are hard.  No one imagines the immense pressure to be a great parent is part of that burden.  We shouldn’t add to it by demonizing those who formula feed or those who breastfeed in any way shape or form.

My suggestions are simple:

1.  Add a class for infant feeding and nutrition that talks about breast feeding and formula feeding and is open to both.

2.  Add feeding consultants at hospitals that are knowledgeable about formula but not paid for by the formula companies.  Also beef up the lactation consultants–the ones I had weren’t very good at all.  Probably wasn’t the reason why it didn’t work for me but it certainly didn’t help just to be told to “keep up the good work!” when I was sitting there crying out for help.

3.  Stop talking in hushed tones if you bottle feed.  Stop hiding your nursing if you breast feed.  You don’t have to tell your life story to strangers and you don’t have to whip out your boob in the middle of the mall…though both would be fine by me.  But don’t lurk in the shadows because the system is set up that way. To hell with the system.

and…

4.  For the love of God, stop condemning the choices of others about how they feed their kids as long as their kids are getting fed and are loved.

————————-

Helpful resources:

For breastfeeding moms: the best resource I found was Kellymom.  I will say, though, that while the information is not presented with bias, there is a lack of information about transitioning out of breastfeeding if it doesn’t work for you. It’s kind of assumed that it will work.   The La Leche League site is useful but is very judgmental so use it with a grain of salt…or a bucket of salt.  Just get some salt when you sit down and use it.  Sadly, they do have all of the best info about specific breastfeeding issues out there and the cost of admission is total judgment.  So I won’t link to them.

For formula feeding moms: the best resources for me are Fearless Formula Feeder and Bottle Babies (which is worldwide, so formula information is sometimes hard to wade through).  The site and the Facebook page in particular have been lifesavers.  I’m not even exaggerating when I say that.

—————–

And the most important question of all is…

What has your experience been and what did you need when you were feeding your infant?

In Paris there is a place near Notre Dame called Point Zero.  (Sounds better if you use the French accent.)  The point used to (allegedly) be the starting point of all of the roads from Paris.  Legend has it that if you set foot on this spot you are destined to return to it.

My education is my Point Zero.  I am forced to measure everything from it despite it being a moving target.  And even though my life encompasses much more than my CV can contain, my mental Point Zero has always resided at the letters that fall after my name.  It’s the one thing that I know I can do and do well.

Over the past week, I have had this nagging sensation in my head that either means I forgot to do something important like put on a bra or that I have a life-changing decision on my mind.   Turns out that I had a bra on (at all pertinent times), but that I needed to decide to stop being everything all at once and revisit my plan of doing ALL THE THINGS.

I enjoy doing all the things.  Truly and fully.  But I also don’t half-ass things that I love and care about.  (I do half ass laundry.)  Therefore, barring receiving a full time teaching job that I applied for and that might require my continued education, I’m going to take a leave of absence from my PhD program for now.

You can always set your foot on Point Zero.

There. I said it.  I feel like I just admitted to murder or something.  Simultaneously I feel dirty and emboldened.  Burdened and free.

When I make one of these decisions to let something go I have to acknowledge the thing I’m giving up.  I also usually have to let go of my bull-headish way that I need to do so much in the span of a day, a month, a year, etc.  I scream and yell and piss and moan and call out the Universe for its infinite unfairness and then I express intentions to move forward either way.

All things are measured from Point Zero.  

But as I was applying for loans so I could do this full time and making plans and thinking of research proposals, I started to question the value of what I was doing in my life right now and five years from now.  Could I be fulfilled without it?  Could I do it justice?  And then reality came pounding on my door despite a very strongly worded NO SOLICITING sign.  I couldn’t make a 24 hour day fit enough within its confines to make it work while maintaining all of the other things I love.  It was either do this 100% and give up my sanity or not do it at all.  I’d rather not do it at all.  For now.

You will always return to Point Zero.

I cannot give in easily.  I’m sure it’s some sign that I’m more damaged than I ever imagined.  Perhaps this is is a bad thing, but it’s also that part of me that ensures that I’ll do more than just coast through life.   It’s hard to downshift from having a white knuckle grip on ambition and truly appreciate that the ride might have to be enough right now.  I need to get hurt.  I need to let that hurt rattle around inside of me.  And then I need to take that pain and frustration and learn to see through them and not just past them.

There’s a time and place for fighting the Universe and its long string of injustices.  But now is not the time for that battle.  Now is not the time to prove I can.  Maybe for once in my life it’s time to prove that I can’t.  Or that I won’t.  Or that I’m fine with going without.   Goddamn that sounds so zen of me.

Point Zero will lead you home.

When I first landed in Paris I made certain I stepped on Point Zero.  When I was drawn back to Notre Dame by friends I met in school, I stepped on it again.  It seemed like I needed an extra dose to ever bring me back to the City of Lights.  It’s been eleven years since that second visit.  I haven’t returned.  And although I’d love to, I don’t feel like I have to.  I set foot there. I know I can return.  I know that it’s not as easy as saying I want to, but it’s not as hard as I’d let myself make it out to be.

Maybe my PhD is like that.  I’ll set my foot on Point Zero right now.  Tap it for good luck.  And if my road never leads back to Paris, I’ll have to enjoy the time I had there in the recesses of my mind on a cloudy day when I dream about what could have been in a moment between what is and will be.

You are your own Point Zero. You are the point from which all roads start and end.

Never forget it.

]]> http://perfectlycursedlife.com/?feed=rss2&p=4120 2 http://perfectlycursedlife.com/?p=4120 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/perfectlycursedlife/oEpa/~3/hx2mFd65N0o/ http://perfectlycursedlife.com/?p=4113#comments Thu, 06 Jun 2013 15:38:58 +0000 kim http://perfectlycursedlife.com/?p=4113

For the love of all applicable deities, do not go to law school.

This morning I log in to Facebook and see an article shared about the local attorney factory, Cooley Law School, offering a two year law school education.  A similar push is going on in the state of New York.  Two year law school isn’t the problem.  I honestly don’t think the legal education you get in your third year is that much more superior to the learning you get on the job.  What is the problem then?  All of the damn extra lawyers this will produce.  Cooley has already saturated the market round these parts.

Don’t go to law school because you’re good at arguing.  Go join the debate team and get that out of your system.

And don’t do it because you want to help people.

Of any random sampling of ten people who want to go to law school, only three of them should.  In this economy, really only one should–and that’s the full time professional who can use a legal degree to climb the ladder in their current industry.

I’m going to be Buzz Killington here for a minute, so bear with me.

Picture it.  Detroit.  2003.

Young, bright eyed college grad takers her totally useful degree in French and Political Science and embarks on the law school journey because she feels she can “help people” with a law degree.  Hell, she even gets a partial scholarship.  Deep in her heart, she knows she wants to teach at the college level one day but thinks that she should have a legal career “helping people” first.  She dives in.  Her first year is hard. Really hard.  She decided to go at night and work during the day, so her grades are a bit lower than she is used to.  But despite all of that, she finds a law clerk job, starts doing moot court competitions and even wins awards.  She’s also involved in the student bar association and other organizations that get her all kinds of great shit for her resume.

And then she gets what she thinks will be a dream job working for a law firm that represents labor unions.  Helping people, indeed!

In the two years she is there, she realizes that this job is far from the dream she anticipated and closer to a mental breakdown.  Perhaps if she were making more money she could afford all of the therapy she needed to make it through the day.  Perhaps if she had a bit more support in the form of true mentorship, she would have known what was needed from her.  Instead, she flails until she hits a massive depression, questioning every move she has ever made and deciding that she will never again work as an associate in a law firm.

Now, not everyone has the same experience.  But of the hundreds of people I met in law school, I can only think of three who can stand what they do in a way that they’d choose it all over again if they had to.  And each month that passes, that number dwindles.

I try to be kind when people ask me if they should go to law school.  I try.  But now, I think I’m doing them a disservice.  I wish someone had pulled me aside and really explained what law school would mean for me and my life.  I might have still gone, but it would have been nice to have a choice made with full knowledge.

Here is why you should NOT go to law school.

1.  There are too many lawyers for the available jobs.  In some states, like Michigan, there are at least two unemployed lawyers for every one job.  Probably closer to 5.  Good luck finding a job.

2.  The education costs too much.  And even if you get a partial scholarship like me, you’ll soon realize that all they did was give you a small discount to sink their hooks into you.  It costs over $200k to go to law school.  No kidding. The cost keeps growing.  That’s the kind of burden only people with grand treasure chests of money or a good escape plan should commit themselves to using.

3.  There are too many areas of the law that are shrinking for most people.  The only area of law where you’ll find a job no matter what?  Patent law.  And you have to have a science or engineering background for that and pass a separate bar exam.

4.  If you’re a woman, just don’t bother.  Yes we need more women in every profession and especially the legal profession as it’s a springboard to political office, but good god think twice if you want a career and a family.  Because all of your bosses will be men with stay at home wives and they will not understand the need for you to take the afternoon off to go to your kid’s dance recital or doctor’s appointment.  They just won’t. And, oh, by the way, blatant sexism is alive and well in the legal field.  You will be given more work, far less credit, less money and fewer chances for being thanked.  Meanwhile your male counterpart will get the verbal equivalent of a hand job every time he submits a motion on time.  It’s soul crushing.

5.  The jobs that are out there suck.  They are thankless lots of life where you work insane hours (60-70 hours per week), are judged not by the work you do but how much you do it (billable hours) and, oh, by the way, you can barely afford to pay your student loans, eat dinner and pay for the alcohol, therapy or combination of both you’ll need.

6.  Oh yeah…lawyers have the highest rates of alcoholism and depression of any profession.  Associate in a law firm was rated the most despised job of them all.  Think about that for a second.  People are happier cleaning other people’s feces up for a living than being an associate attorney.

7.  You won’t end up helping people.  Every once in awhile you will.  And it will feel amazing.  But those times are few and far between.  Soon you’ll realize that even representing the most amazing organizations means doing a lot of grunt work and representing them no matter what they do.  And even the best orgs make horrid decisions.  So have fun with that.  There is no right and wrong…there are varying shades of gray.  The other thing…when you work with people who think they’re doing god’s work, they kind of think of themselves as martyrs.  Have fun working with them.

8.  Every vacation you take will be insufficient and potentially ruined.  In my second year as an associate we took an awesome Jamaican all inclusive vacation.  You know what I did?  I sat around all day most days and then fell asleep at 7:30 at night.  The Mister tried to wake me up to go do something.  I fell asleep and could not be moved for a good 12 hours because I was that tired.  And when we came home I was still exhausted.  if you like to travel and not vacation (meaning you like to explore places and really immerse yourself) forget it.  You’ll need a beach holiday.

9.  You will end up settling for less in your second job.  I jumped into the next job as a way to escape the first.  And I got stuck. I have a better work life balance, but my pay is horrid and stagnant.  I couldn’t payback my student loans right now even if I wanted to.  But I’m just employed enough to be considered solvent.  Rock. Me. Hardplace.  And there are far too many of my peers in this position.  Don’t think you’ll escape it either.  The second job is better, but it’s not great.

10.  Truth be told, you’d rather be scooping ice cream.  My first year legal writing professor used to joke about this.  I now realize it wasn’t a joke but the kind of cry for help she had perfected over the years.  There are days when I dream about doing something like scooping ice cream.  But that won’t pay the bills. Moreover, no one will hire me to do something like that because I’m overqualified.  Oh, you’re still there rock and hard place?  Honestly, there are days when you’d rather be the garbage man because he gets better pay and benefits.  And when one of the noblest professions of all time makes less than your average garbage man, I would rather ride on the back of a smelly truck.

And the two reasons you should?

1.  Your parents will be proud of you.  Every parent wants to talk about their kid the lawyer.

2.  You will meet lifelong friends.  Honestly, that’s the only thing keeping me from inventing a time machine and doing it all over.

Fellow attorneys?  You feel me?  What about other professions?

I loved the story of Matilda as a child.  I think all children feel misunderstood to some extent.  I never knew any of my peers to feel completely secure in themselves and the way in which their friends and family treated them.  But there was something extra pertinent about it for me that I could never pinpoint.  I didn’t want to run away with my teacher as my new mom.  I wasn’t forced to do insane amounts of physical labor or anything crazy.  I just felt…misunderstood.

I know…cue the world’s smallest violin.

It took me until my 29th year and estimated 1,107th hour of therapy to understand my connection to Matilda.  

I know that my parents love me and are proud of me.  They support me and would take a bullet for me. But they do not understand me.  Don’t get me wrong–there are points at which we connect on an individual level.  My mom and I like a lot of the same music.  My dad and I can talk politics and current events.  But when I start talking about not feeling fulfilled with something or wanting more or things that make me happy intellectually, I get a blank stare that usually results in them turning their attention elsewhere.

Case in point:  Last week the nonprofit that I’ve been working with on organization and fundraising for almost two years won a $100k grant.  My work directly helped the group get to this point and my brother’s roommate and best friend brings it up at dinner with my parents.  At first my parents asked about it–my dad even saying that he heard about it on the radio–and as I start to explain it and answer their questions, they blatantly stop listening and start talking among themselves.  I’m so used to this that I didn’t even notice and just mutter to myself “well, I guess I’ll just stop talking then.”  Mr. Peace, the relative outsider to the group chuckles and mentions it the next day via social media.  It took him mentioning it for it to really hit home to me.  Had he not said anything, I would have totally blown it off not because it wasn’t important but because it’s so frequent.  

My parents understood me graduating from college.  My parents understood me graduating law school and passing the bar exam.  They most certainly didn’t understand what these took both physically and mentally.  But it was something they could talk about easily to their friends and family and something that they could wrap their heads around.

But my parents never understood my involvement in theater in high school.  They’d come to one showing of each production, maybe my mom would come to two.  They’d wish me well on my youth ministry retreats and events, but never volunteered to go on any of them.  This has been a running chorus throughout my life.  They know that I’ve accomplished things and they’re proud of me but they have no true appreciation for these things.  My brother, on the other hand, played sports and they got that so much so that they coached his teams, volunteered for his outings and ran the basketball boosters.

To this day they don’t get how this made me feel.  I’ve brought it up only to be told “well, we didn’t really like plays.”  As if that were the point…

They support me.  They love me.  But they do not understand me.

My therapist has been telling me this for years.  It’s not a slight to them.  It’s too late to fix that broken down train.  But she’s mentioned it so that I can learn to move past it.  And every single time she says it, I’ve acknowledged it and given platitudes about realizing it.

I’m here to say that I was full of shit.

I don’t realize it.  I haven’t worked through it.  I want to not care about it and appreciate the relationship I have with my parents without constantly feeling like that oddball that doesn’t fit.  I just have never explored the issue deeply enough to really do that.  Exploration of that issue requires revealing certain amounts of hurt that I’ve joked about over the years but never truly gotten over.   I should. It’s not like I was overtly abused or neglected.  But there’s a part of me that is still that teenager hoping her parents would send her flowers during her last production in high school theater or would read a book she lent them in the hopes of having a good discussion about something she found important.

I need to let this go. 

It’s not going to be easy.  Hitting publish on this blog post won’t solve it.  I think that I’m just now grasping the girth of this issue in a way that will require some soul searching.  And honestly, at this point in my life, talking to my parents about it isn’t going to do any good.  It’s my feelings that I need to work through and not their reaction to me as a person.  I need to do this so that I can appreciate them as individuals, so that I can have some peace and so that I am confident that I don’t repeat this cycle.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to point out those things that hurt us the most.  We’ve placed bandages over scars and layers of clothing over bandages to move on, never truly cleaning out the wounds underneath.  I can choose to ignore the infection this has caused or I can go in, clean it up and look at the scar anew with the promise that I’ve learned from it instead of constantly feeling the pain and pushing it aside.

I just hope I’m up to the challenge.

I don’t wake up pissed off every morning.  Honestly, I don’t.  Most mornings I’m too exhausted to be pissed.  I walk around in the kind of haze that insists upon causing me to run into walls and forget to turn off alarms.  Add in allergy season when my eyes feel like they’re glued shut, it’s pretty much like I don’t even have a say in what goes on pre-9 am.

But I’ll be damned if people don’t feel the need to push my buttons real early.

I don’t have a dedicated morning music or talk program anymore. I’ve gone through too many of them over the years only to be disappointed.  So I allow myself the freedom of doing what I want each morning and not feeling married to some set of disc jockeys.  At least until Ms. MM and I get our own radio show with Ms. TC as our color commentator, then there’s no need to feel compelled to stick to one thing.

I digress.

This morning, I’m driving with my coffee and all of a sudden two radio hosts start discussing the new Cheerios commercial.  Honestly, I heard that there was outrage over this last week.  But frankly, when the people getting outraged are known bigots, then I tend to not only remain unsurprised but just try to move on.  There is no changing some people and I’m sick of repeatedly banging my head against that wall.  So I didn’t even bother looking at the commercial until today.  I knew whatever it was, people were “outraged” for no reason.

I was right.

The commercial is about as innocent as a commercial can be.  Maybe more so.  A girl is told by her mom that Cheerios are good for cholesterol and your heart.  The girl runs to the other room.  Cut to the dad waking up from a nap with a box’s worth of Cheerios on his chest.  Cute, right?  What’s so offensive?  Oh, the mom is white, the dad is black and the child is biracial.  Yep, that’s it.

Good freaking lord.

So I had to turn the station when I started to hear one of the hosts say that Cheerios made the ad to be controversial.  Really?  Featuring biracial people is controversial?  Are we just supposed to pretend they don’t exist?  And if so, why?  Does it offend you?  Because that’s the only way it’d be controversial.

For some reason I made my way back around to this station later and caught a bit of a different news story that was trying to be tied with the Cheerios one.  Indiana Pacers center Roy Hibbert was fined $75,000 by using the phrase “no homo” and calling the media “motherfuckers” during a postgame press conference.  Sure enough, within two minutes a caller called in to say that saying “no homo” wasn’t as offensive as racial slurs because race and color isn’t a choice.  Um…neither is homosexuality.  And even if it was, does that make it appropriate to blatantly offend people?

I am so tired of being the angry woman all the time.  To be honest, it’s fucking exhausting.  It takes so much energy to be outraged and even more to do something productive about it.  And, yes, I find Facebook comments and conversations productive because we need to talk about this shit, dammit.  This isn’t something we should just ignore.  Sorry that I use my social media as a way to discuss matters of importance in the world.

And by that I mean…sorry I’m not sorry.

But I also don’t have the energy to let them go.  That takes a certain amount of zen that I don’t think will ever be mine in this lifetime.  It also takes a certain amount of not caring about the world around you.  It’s one thing to ignore the blatant bigots. I’m not going to go to a Klan meeting and think I’ll be heard.  But I’m also not going to stay silent in the face of such idiocy.  That’s even more exhausting and even less right.

I’d be out in a parade marching for this stuff if I had time and wasn’t giving the negative time I have to ALL the causes.  Plus, social media discussions fuel my fire and help me refine my positions.  Not to mention that they help my introvert self get things done.

So yeah, I’m fucking mad.  And you should be too.  We don’t have to be angry 24/7, but if we’re not getting angry at all, then the world we want to live in will be subsumed by the world that awaits us if our apathy wins.

By popular demand, I give you the origins of the girls’ names.

For some reason, names are extremely important to me. I don’t name things without a great deal of thought and care.  Nicknames take time to achieve full power in my life, but when they do they are full of meaning for me.  Actually naming something for the rest of it’s life takes a great deal of thought and care.

When I was pregnant, people constantly asked what the girls’ names were going to be.  Now, I wouldn’t have told them either way.  There are some secrets a pregnant woman should get to keep.  But more importantly, I needed time to get them just right. This wasn’t some easy task.  I was named because my parents were able to agree upon this name.  (Dad wanted Heather, Mom wanted Brittney or Tiffany…I’ll let you think about those options for a moment and be glad they settled on Kimberly and even shortened it to Kim.)

Giving someone their legal name is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.

But I think we got it right.

Emma

Emma’s full name (minus her last name) is Emma Anne Corey.  Emma Anne is her first name.  Corey is her middle name. Yes, she has twelve names.  As my mom said, it’s probably a cruel fate in some ways.  (Ms.MEPS might agree as she, too, has four names.)  But knowing that these kids might be our only ones and knowing there were certain traditions we wanted to carry on and honor, we ran out of space.  Honoring The Mister’s Dad’s side of the family was kind of being taken care of with the last name so we didn’t feel the pressure of having to fit that in.  Anne is my middle name.  Corey is The Mister’s Mom’s maiden name.  My mother and I share the same middle name (minus one letter) and it was important to me to keep this tradition.  The Mister was very close to his mother’s parents and it was important to me to honor them.

Emma…well, Emma was The Mister’s pick.  It was his pick very early on, mind you.  Towards the date of their arrival, he tried to tell me that name (and another we did not use) came to him in a dream.  I think he just knew that names meant a lot to me as do dreams so that I’d fall for it.  I tossed and turned over Emma. It’s soooooo popular these days.  There are going to be at least five Emma’s in her grade at any given school.  I reasoned that she’ll just have to work to make herself unique.

And now that she’s here and has a little personality of her own, I have no doubt that she’ll be able to set herself apart. That and the fact that her first name isn’t just Emma alone.

Ellie

Having twin girls gave me the perfect opportunity to put together the feminist dream ticket–Hillary and Eleanor.  The Mister wasn’t too against Hillary. He just was more for Emma. And he knew exactly what I was doing.  I think the glimmer in my eyes gave it away.

Having girls in this world is a double edged sword. Each one has the potential to push the female sex toward equality.  But having a flimsy name, in my opinion, can work against them.  I’ve been wrong about things like this before (Barack Obama), but the first female president is going to need a bulletproof name.  I want my girls to have the same thing.  Eleanor is as about as bulletproof as you can get.  Eleanor Roosevelt was a fucking badass.  I always knew that, but last year in my presidency class I got fed up with talking about a bunch of dudes and decided to do my research paper on first ladies–Hillary and Eleanor to be exact.  The more I learned about Eleanor, the more I loved her.  She didn’t just stand up for herself and for women, she ran the damn show in her life…and really in the Democratic Party until her death.  That’s a name to be loved and feared.  Machiavelli be damned! You can do both!

So now came the hard part.  I knew that I wanted to honor my Nana with one of the girls’ names.  But Ida isn’t exactly a name that works well for a little girl these days.  And every name I paired it with as a middle name didn’t seem to roll off the tongue either.  It got stuck in my mouth waiting for another syllable to set it free.  So I started searching for names similar to or derivatives of Ida.  And Dr. Google came to my rescue one winter day when it was revealed to me by the Internet Gods that Idalie means active in German.  The top baby in the transverse pair of fetuses that hung out in my body for 9+ months was every bit as active as any Olympic athlete I watched last summer.  She tossed and turned and in every ultrasound picture was taking up far too much room than she should have had allotted to her.  She was the very definition of active.

So in the end, her fierceness worked well with Eleanor and her desire to keep moving naturally called to Idalie.  Even though we call her Ellie, I will never let her forget her namesakes.  This name won’t be wasted on this girl.

So there you have it.  The girls names. The process.  The daunting tale of getting a Type-A introvert who thinks names are one of the most important things in the world to settle on two names after a lifetime of having a name that was just a mere settlement on the part of her predecessors.

Yes, I’m fully aware my girls will need therapy.  But at least they’ll be able to go into therapy with wicked awesome and well thought out names.

though she be little

I’ll be back to a heartfelt post tomorrow. But I had a rough night…mostly of my own making.  Well, that and fate.  So let’s do this right.

So first, the bulk of the day consisted of both girls crying whenever I stepped away for ten seconds…

We had two doctor’s appointments…

The first one was for Ellie.  But Emma was hamming it up so much that the doctor barely paid attention to Ellie and instead paid attention to Emma…

It was rainy which makes for a real fun time putting two babies into a stroller and in and out of the car…

Any time I set Ellie down during the afternoon she screamed bloody murder…

No one napped despite being exhausted…

I was a bit exhausted by the end of the day…

So I sit down and start doing things on the computer and get sucked into far too many things…

The Mister starts watching The Deadliest Catch which apparently is a twelve hour show…

I tell him that there are a few bigger matters I’d like to discuss when his show is over. He looks at me, a commercial starts and he says “just do it during the commercial.”

So I have him pause it and there’s still like 6 hours left of the show.  I tell him to hurry up and watch it as I don’t want to discuss life changing matters in a commercial break…

Show ends finally. We talk.  End up talking and having one of those good conversations that reminds you of why you like a person…

Especially when that person tells a story that makes you have an asthma attack from laughing so hard…

But that means you have to use your inhaler…

And you just had a giant Slurpee…

So you can’t sleep…

I get up and go to the living room and start messing around on the computer, waiting for sleep to hit…

At 1:30 am I say by 2 am I’ll be in bed…

At 2:30 am I say that by 3 am I’ll be in bed…

At 3 am I say that this is madness…

And then I get delirious…

At 3:30 am I go to bed…

Which means I was up until 4 am with no good reason like babies or work or anything worthwhile…

This morning I woke up and hated my life because I could barely peel my eyes open…

While I was falling asleep in the shower it hits me…I couldn’t sleep because of the damn inhaler.  This means that it’s The Mister’s fault for me not being able to sleep…

I think I am owed something fun and delicious for lunch…

I am four months from my 32nd birthday and other than some vague descriptions of life, I really have no idea what I want to “be” when I grow up, which by all accounts was a couple of years ago.  The question alone seems so loaded.  What do you do? in your thirties is the What do you want to be when you grow up? of your childhood.  In my twenties it was socially acceptable not to have a soundbite-sized answer.  These days, it’s harder.

What’s funny, though, is that in my twenties I actually had a soundbite sized answer.  It just turned out to be so very wrong for me.  It was like I was dressing up and playing pretend and not really being anything.  Maybe that’s what being a grown up really is for the majority of people.  But I couldn’t stand my life being that way, and so I went back to school (yes, again) and started down a new path. That path could have been any other path.  The problem isn’t that I chose another path (if there is a problem at all).  It’s that there are so many paths that look amazing to me.

I did not get the fellowship or any financial assistance (other than the ability to take out more loans) for my grad school endeavors.  As I near the end of my coursework, having a 9-5 job and two infants is impossible.  Something has to give.  The fellowship would have been an easy answer to that conundrum.  Getting paid to go to school–even at a significantly lower rate than I’m getting paid to go to work–would have been very doable.

My life does not have easy answers.

It isn’t that I didn’t know what I want to do, it is that I probably want too much and this puts a wrench in my plan to do it all.  Despite a former iteration of myself having a stock answer to the big question of life described above, the answer has never been simple because despite enjoying many things and being curious about others, I’ve never been able to narrow it down to an easy path.  There is no easy path when you want to do ALL the things.

I want to finish my PhD in political science and teach.  I also want to do research on political socialization. I also want to write about feminism and politics on a theoretical level.

I want to brush up on my French.  I also want to learn Spanish.  I also want to learn Polish.

I want to drive a sports car. But I also want to drive a minivan (don’t judge…the ride is wicked smooth). I also want my 86 Ford Escort back.  I also want my 86 Oldsmobile Delta 88 back.  Taking naps in the Olds was pure heaven.

I want to live in Detroit.  I want to live in the suburbs.  I want to live in Traverse City.  I want to live in Las Vegas.  I want to live in the country.  I want to live in the city.  In a house. In an apartment. In a high rise.

Am I really this indecisive? 

The Mister would say that I am.  Asking what I want for dinner is a one way ticket to a mind-numbing exercise in decision making.

But I’ve never been so wishy-washy about getting what I want from my education and work.  Yet, here I am. Stuck at the corner of Not So Fast and Wait a Minute.  Do I just forego the PhD? Do I forge ahead at full steam and take out even more student loans? Do I take a break and risk having my credits expire?  Do I just move to the country, let The Mister’s income take care of us and learn to bake and homemake with the best of them?

Rock. Me. Hard place.

There’s no obvious right answer.  No right path.  No good solution.  And so here I am, yet again, waiting for things to fall into place and when they don’t, having to push the pieces around to a suitable arrangement.  That task is compounded by having multiple paths that could work.

In the end, being true to myself means forging ahead with the PhD and finishing the coursework while the girls are too young to remember me being gone an hour or two before their bedtime each night.  It means busting my ass now and losing sleep getting my reading done so I can have a better life not only for myself, but for them when they’re older.  If it means taking out more loans, what’s another inch of water in the ocean at this point?

I’ll forge ahead.  But all the things have had a chance to present themselves again and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to wanting to do too much in too little time.  Mother. Student. Educator. Attorney. Non profit organizer.  Wife. Writer.  And yes, I’m working on a more creative side project.  Because, you know, it’s too easy just to have all of the other things fill my time.

I’d want to be a cat, but nine lifetimes isn’t enough to do what I want in this world.  I’ll just have to make the most of this one and take on the burdens associated with living a full life.  And that is something that I fully intend on doing.