Secret Santa

Last night I received this gift from my Secret Santa, which begs the question: Can a childfree woman enjoy mommy porn? 

I'll let you know. Either way I'm sure I'll enjoy the Candy Cane Joe Joe's.

My Plan to End the War on Women

In my last post I complained about how Oprah has set the bar too high for childfree women, protesting that my greatest aspiration was to drink wine. I was being a little disingenuous. With all that spare time and money I have because I'm not raising kids I decided to take a stand-up comedy class. (Actually it was my husband's idea, so you can blame him for what you are about to see.)  This is how I came up with my solution to end the war on women.  How Oprah is that?

Warning: I doubt many people who have kids are reading this blog, but just in case, I say c*nt a lot in the video.

,

The Oprah Problem

By vargas2040,
Cropped by OsamaK
[CC-BY-SA-2.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons

Not too long ago a woman who chose to be childfree was suspect in our society. But now, thanks to celebrities, that's all changing. Just like Lindsay Lohan made drunk driving and shoplifting cool again, celebrities like Helen Mirren, Eva Mendes, Ellen and Portia, Cameron Diaz, and Rachel Ray are making it hip to be childfree. Even Jon Hamm is joining in. His longtime girlfriend recently told the press they're quite happy with their life as is and aren't interested in having kids.  Unfortunately this one just left me feeling depressed; if there's anyone who should be contributing to the gene pool it's Jon Hamm.

Of course there is one childfree celebrity that stands out among the rest.  She is our flagship, so to speak, and she is Oprah.

You would think I would love Oprah for this, but the truth is I'm totally annoyed with her for setting our bar ridiculously high.  Because here's the thing: when you are a childfree woman of a certain age there's an unspoken expectation that you're actually supposed to DO SOMETHING with your life. Oh you know, like start a television network or educate all the girls in South Africa or publish a magazine with your picture on the cover every month.  And I feel bad about this. First of all there's the gender inequality of it. George Clooney is our most famous childfree male celebrity and all we really want him to do is show up on the red carpet with a supermodel on his arm (to the extent that the public seems almost visibly annoyed when he reminds us there's a genocide going on in Darfur). But mostly I feel bad about this because with all that spare time and money I have on my hands because I don't have to buy diapers, all I really want to do is drink wine. I know I should be out there shattering glass ceilings on behalf of all my women friends with kids who are just too tired to do it themselves, but instead I'm quite content to scale mount mediocrity when it comes to my corporate career. Just as long as I make enough to buy the wine.

I am willing to concede Oprah, but to all you other childfree celebs out there, here's my plea. Could you please just be a little less spectacular in your achievements? It would make it a lot easier on the rest of us.

Meet Grýla, Iceland's Christmas Ogre

As I've gotten older Christmas has become more of an ordeal. It's primary function these days is to remind my parents that I've failed to bestow them with grandchildren, which means going home is not an attractive holiday option. But now, at last, I think I may have found a place where even I could get into the Christmas spirit. 

"Christmas in Iceland is not a season for sissies." So began the article I found flipping through the Iceland Air in-flight magazine on my way to Reykjavik for work last week. Entitled "Maneater," it was all about Grýla, Iceland's Yuletide ogre, and she's too good not to share.

While other countries have Santa Claus and reindeer, Iceland has Grýla and her sons, the Yule lads.  Each year Grýla descends from the mountains "to kidnap misbehaving children and drag them back to her lair in a burlap sack."  She ate her first husband and still dabbles in cannibalism, enjoying the occasional dish of stewed child.  Best of all the article notes "she is...an example of a strong, decisive female in Iceland."  (Suddenly Björk makes more sense.)

Grýla's thirteen sons -- her children with her third husband -- play the role of Santa Claus,  leaving gifts for well behaved children.  No Dashers or Dancers here; instead the Yule Lads have names like Pot Licker, Sausage Swiper, Window Peeper and Keyhole Sniffer.  Lest you think Christmas in Iceland is starting to sound all warm and fuzzy, don't forget about Grýla's cat, who inexplicably devours children who don't get any new clothes for Christmas.  

Motherhood via bed bugs

I am concerned we may have bed bugs in the guesthouse. It's at least one explanation for the constellation of angry red planets that materialized on Wednesday in the most inconvenient places -- the side of my big toe, the tips of my elbows, that spot under my left arm that perfectly aligns with the underwire of my bra for maximum irritation. I am still searching for evidence to ascertain my conclusion, but of the two potential culprits I have spotted, one got away and I killed the other before I could examine it against the picture on Wikipedia. I certainly hope it is not bed bugs because, well, they're a thing other people get.  I remember hearing a story not so long ago on This American Life about some renters in Brooklyn who had a terrible infestation, made worse by the fact that they were too poor to move. That's right, too poor. Which is what I really mean by other people: bed bugs are a lower socioeconomic class problem, right? (Of course I know I deserve to have bed bugs by writing that.)

On the upside, if we do have bed bugs it will be chance for me to experience motherhood without ever having a kid. Let me explain.

When I was in the second grade I got lice. It was going around and so my whole class had to line up outside the school clinic and, one-by-one, get examined by the school nurse wielding a disposable wide-tooth comb.   I remember having a vague feeling of humiliation when I was quarantined after my examination and told to wait for my mother to pick me up from school early. But that was nothing compared to the humiliation my mother felt at having to retrieve a child with lice. Her disdain was akin to if I had been sent home for having a venereal disease. She was absolutely sure I had caught it from my scruffy then-best friend who lived in Pine Manor, the local slum. I am a bit ashamed I don't remember my best friend of second grade's name, but I am pretty sure it was something like Amber or Tiffany, the kind of names that only the girls who lived in Pine Manor had. In any case, my mother made it clear that once she had deloused me, she would prefer if I would spend a little less time hanging with Amber/Tiffany.

And so if we do have bed bugs, I guess I will finally get to experience my mother's shameful brand of shame. I am hopeful we don't, not just because it would be embarrassing but also itchy and costly to remedy. My husband has yet to get any bites, so maybe my own spots will turn out to be mosquitoes or ants or something less serious. In the meantime I'm keeping my tube of anti-itch gel is in easy reach.

Notes from a Star Trek Virgin

George Takei and Walter Koenig, aka Sulu and Chekov,
take the stage in Vegas

Much to my husband's chagrin, science fiction and I have never gotten along.  I love to read, but somehow the trappings of outer space/robots/<insert sci-fi cliché here> render the genre inaccessible to me.  I am in fact a much less imaginative reader than the average sci-fi fan; I like my writing served straight-up, preferably in memoir form by a woman who has a lot in common with me.  It's the same when it comes to television.  I vaguely remember watching Battle Star Galactica - the 1978 version - with my dad, but that's about it.

My husband, on the other hand, considers the crew of the Starship Enterprise family, or, more precisely, supplemental parents.  The two parents he was originally allocated were a little absent for various and assorted -isms and -nias, leaving Star Trek to teach him the big life lessons about ethics, tolerance, and humanism.  It's no surprise William Shatner is his hero, which is why I felt so bad when, earlier this year, I came down with food poisoning and scuppered our plans to see his one man show.  My guilt over that incident is why I agreed to accompany my husband to Las Vegas earlier this month for Shatner's supposed last ever appearance at a Star Trek convention.  It turns out I had something to learn from Trek (and Trekkies) too.

Lessons from Las Vegas

1. Books matter.
Technically this falls into the category of things I already knew, but I loved the story I heard at the convention about where (series creator) Gene Roddenberry's ideas about tolerance and inclusiveness came from.  It turns out it wasn't from his parents -- his mother was a prim and proper and mildly racist southern belle, while his father was an overtly racist Irish cop -- but rather from all the time he spent reading when he was bedridden with childhood polio.

2. Don't be afraid to ask questions.
I found out Gene Roddenberry was influenced by reading because my husband stood up and asked the question during a session with Roddenberry's longtime assistant, Richard Arnold.  I've always been a little self-conscious about doing that kind of thing in front of lots of people.  Then I saw a woman with cerebral palsy ask a question at the mike.  It took a lot of effort and time, and yet my husband informed me she had asked an awesome question at every session.  (I admit it, I was getting a pedicure and lounging poolside for some of the sessions.)

3. Trekkies are geeks and they don't care what you think.
They are too busy having geeky, dress-up, karaoke fun (see 2. above re self-consciousness).  The best moment of the weekend was seeing aliens sipping martinis interspersed among the overweight, middle-America families during lunchtime at the casino grill.  Trekkies in full regalia were everywhere except, noticeably, at the casino tables, which I took as more evidence of what well-adjusted human beings they are.

4. Trekkies are a diverse lot.
I'll be honest, I was expecting this convention to be dominated by chubby pale men of a certain age.  Instead I found young, old, Asian, black, white, female, male, gay, straight, transvestite, prepster, hipster, obese enough to need a motorized trolley, and thin enough to look hot in a Nurse Chapel costume (see transvestite).  And now for my duh moment: they all love Star Trek because from the beginning it showed someone like them.  Or if it didn't, at least it seemed like the kind of place where someone like them (which de facto means you and me) would fit in.

5. Don't be stingy.
My husband hasn't earned his nickname, Dusty Wallet, by being generous.  True to form, on Sunday morning in the casino diner he asked our server if he could have extra toast in lieu of the preserves listed on the menu, which were foil packets of Smuckers already on the table. I was so mortified it was all I could to do to keep from shouting we"ll just pay that extra $1 for some more toast.  But by Sunday afternoon his wallet had opened into a chasm in which $100 photo ops with Shatner and $70 Starfleet insignia cuff links were tossed with abandon.

6. It's never to late to say you're sorry.
For years William Shatner ridiculed Trekkies (see 3. above re geeks) until another Star Trek captain, Patrick Stewart, helped him see what a privilege it is that he was part of such a legendary body of work.  Now Shatner shows up at conventions.  Admittedly his opening gambit was to alienate all the women in the room by suggesting a woman should have never been captain, but at least the guy has a sense of humor.

7. How to grow old gracefully.
William Shatner is now eighty-one years old.  In the last year he has written a book, performed a one man show, and starred in a documentary (and those are only the projects I happened to note).  For this lesson it's best to see Shatner yourself, and luckily, starting in January 2013, he's reviving his one-man show.  I already have my tickets.

Chapter One of Americashire, my childfree origin story

Today's post is a preview of my memoir, Americashire: A field guide to a marriage.  It's the story of how I decided not to have children dressed up in rural idyll memoir.  It will be available in full as soon as I convince an agent to represent a non-celebrity written memoir or swallow my pride and get motivated enough to self-publish.  I hope you enjoy.

Chapter One: Pink Foil Strips

Spring in the Cotswolds happens very slowly and all at once. In exchange for a few cheerful daffodils, the British collectively suspend their disbelief and start to talk of it in March. But spring doesn’t really happens until mid-April on a particular day when the landscape is dun brown in the morning but by evening you find that green has tipped the balance. Soon lush shag piles of minty-green grass and weeds and shoots and blooms line the country lanes, rising into pea-soup hedgerows, then the brown latticework of trees still bare except for pinch-faced buds. Over the next two weeks, these unwind into a canopy of chartreuse lace, set off by a sprinkling of bluebells on the woodland floor. These are not blue, lavender, lilac, or violet. They are plain purple, the one you get in the Crayola eight-pack.

Rapeseed happens next. Nothing changes the landscape of the Cotswolds more drastically or quickly than the en masse bloom of this flower. It is the color of Ronald McDonald’s jumpsuit or the cheap mustard you get in a plastic packet with your corndog at the beach, a color that should not occur in nature, yet it does. It appears in swathes that render the hills a crude patchwork of yellow and green and drives half the population crazy with its hay-fever-provoking scent. Despite all this, I love it. I love everything about this brash landscape of unrepentant lime greens and artificial-food-coloring yellows, which is why I start to feel anxious about its demise almost as soon as I notice it’s happening. Soon May blossom whites and peachy cones of horse-chestnut blooms will be sneaking onto the perimeter, silently upstaging their raucous counterparts with understated elegance. The Cotswolds of Matisse will slip into the diffused light of the Cotswolds of Monet.

Amidst the ephemeral pleasures of spring in the countryside, there was something else to be anxious about. It was wrapped up in a rectangular pink foil strip with twenty-eight pills sealed inside. There were six of those strips to be exact, one for each month of the renewed birth control prescription I had just picked up from the village pharmacy. For the past few months, my husband, D., and I had studiously avoided speaking any further about the “big talk” we had given to my parents over Christmas in which we had announced I was going to try to get pregnant. To be fair, there was plenty to be distracted by in our new country life. But the truth was my ambivalence toward motherhood had not shifted, despite large quantities of fresh air.

The pink-foil-wrapped revelation of my ambivalence shook my husband. A long-held tenet of our relationship was that I was the decisive one, the one who could be counted on to just get on with it. I presided over the world of black and white, the left-brained, the rational. D. held court in the domain of the emotional, the intuitive, the creative. He cries in movies; I bring the tissues. He rearranges the furniture; I pay the mortgage on time. In short, my prescription refill was an act of war: I was invading his territory, and he was pissed.

But before I go any further let me explain how I, a then-thirty-six-year-old American, ended up contemplating motherhood in a Cotswold village with a population dwarfed by that of any single London street. The stock explanation is that we needed to get a good night’s sleep. Since moving to England from Los Angeles, my British husband and I had failed to find accommodation conducive to this simple aim. Our first flat was on a Bayswater side street filled with tall white stucco-fronted terraces that had once been grand single-family homes. They had long since been divided and subdivided again into a rabbit warren of hundreds of studio and one-bedroom flats. D. had secured ours online ahead of our arrival in London, and I’ll never forget the feeling of shock upon climbing the four narrow flights of stairs, my arms laden with bursting suitcases, and flinging open the door for the first time to behold how small three hundred ninety-six square feet really is. Despite its size and thanks to its Kensington Gardens-adjacent address, it cost more in rent each month than the mortgage payment on the Los Angeles home we had just left behind. As if that wasn’t enough, the pipes knocked all night long and a chorus of lunatics routinely serenaded us, their howls ricocheting off the urban canyon formed by the back-to-back mansion blocks.

More recently, we had been living in a stretch of West London that had failed to live up to the promise of gentrification implicit in its Notting Hill-adjacent location. This flat was on the first floor of a three-story brick Victorian terrace, which meant we had upstairs neighbors. Their day seemed to start when ours was finishing, and, other than the possibility they were hosting a midnight furniture-rearrangement league, I never came up with a better explanation for the frequent guests stomping up and down the stairs at odd hours than our neighbor was a drug dealer.

There were other compromises associated with living in central London if, as ours was, your housing budget was limited to a scant quarter million. You might need to live on a street where you occasionally see a man relieving himself behind the dumpsters on the corner or be neighbors with a house full of squatters on the premises of a former Conservative Club, sign and irony still intact. You might wonder what that lady in a miniskirt and a cropped fur coat is doing talking to that gentleman when you leave the house for an early morning jog, or, just once, be greeted by a large yellow sign asking if you know anything about the body dumped in the canal as you decide it’s best to upgrade your jog to a sprint along the tow path. And if you’re young enough, you can probably dismiss these kinds of things as quirky and colorful, the very fiber of your bohemian urban life. But we were old enough to realize that D’s recent modest inheritance—enough to give us some additional square-footage in our current London neighborhood, but not to deliver us into the genteel reaches of, say, Kensington and Chelsea—was well spent on a cottage in the country, if only for weekends. And the truth was we were both partial to the idea of a weekend house.

Weekend house. It had a certain ring to it that was pleasing to the pretensions of our middle-class ears. Nobody had a weekend home where I grew up in Florida, presumably because we all already lived near the beach. The only people I had ever heard of with weekend homes were New Yorkers fleeing to the Hamptons, which seemed suitably glamorous. D. grew up in Liverpool in a middle-class home turned working class by his father’s penchant for drinking his salary. In that universe, a weekend home in the country was beyond imagination. And so we chose it, a recently flooded, two-hundred-year-old cottage without central heating, ninety miles away from London where we worked and lived. There was lots of time to change our minds while the place was drying out, but just before Christmas that year we spent our first night in our very own rural idyll.