Maternally Challenged

The Slog

Another "woe is me" post, you say. Let joy reign unconfined.

But no: this is a public thank-you to my husband. Someone asked why I don't write more about him--well, it's because he doesn't want me to. But there are times when I have to violate that rule, at least a little, just to say that he gets brownie points in heaven for putting up with me, and I am not indulging in a sly little side run toward self-pity when I say that. Living with a person who occasionally suffers from depression can be hell. I read somewhere once that the secret to happiness in marriage is to take a good look at yourself in the mirror every morning and say, "Well, you're no bargain, either." That's pretty much my motto. Whatever faults my husband has, I can see him and raise him two. We've been married long enough now for me to know that marriage is only sometimes a lovely autumn walk in the park; sometimes it's a muddy hike up a mountain in the rain. I look at pictures of happy couples in the wedding section of the paper and think: long hard slog ahead, folks. No getting around it. Marriage is just like that, and the people who don't know that are all too often the ones who create the divorce statistics. The day-to-day creeps up on you, and the constant demands of the kids, and the need to pay the bills, the late-night exhaustion that makes sleep more attractive than sex. The secret is laughing as often as possible, because there is always something funny going on if you look for it, and just plain hanging in there, because better days are ahead.

Not only does my husband hang in there, he also unloads the dishwasher and folds laundry and cleans up cat vomit, and he does it without complaining. (Well, mostly. He's only human.) And have I mentioned he makes telescopes for outer space? Is that cool or what?

So: thanks to a superior human being who rarely gets the credit he deserves. And sorry about breaking that rule.

Hello Again

I should have seen it coming. In fact, I did.

It's fall--a time of year in which I either feel extremely happy or extremely despondent, rarely anything in between. We're coming up on the one-year anniversary of my mother's death. The days are shortening. I have recently had knee surgery, and it was harder than I thought it would be, and the recovery is taking what seems to me to be a long time. So here we are: I am depressed.

Nothing dramatic happens; I just gradually go away. Last night I had the image of myself as a kind of hologram, getting grayer and more colorless, and then fading out of the picture. My kids sense it: they are super clingy and hug me at every opportunity. Suzanne has in the past few days taken to coming up to me at odd moments and saying, "I loooooooovvvee you," which is of course true, and my love for her is so intense it hurts, but then a five-year-old shouldn't feel the need to say that to mommy so often. Rebecca just lays her head on my shoulder. "Snuggle," she commands, and I do. She is nearly 10; the snuggling years are passing fast. "How are you feeling?" my husband asks, meangingfully, and I say, "Not great," and he says, "Your mom?" and I say, "Yes," and then I say, "I'm going to bed." I leave him watching football. I want to be with them, I do; I am lonely in here. But the bell jar, as Sylvia Plath called it, descends, and it is soundproof.

All I can do is keep getting up. I am going to the gym right now, even though I'd give anything to just crawl back into bed. I plod along. One foot. In front. Of the other. And meanwhile time passes, life passes, and joy passes, and I am not present.

Sorting Clothes

I was at a party some months back which featured a bunch of writers. It was the end of the evening, things were winding down, and I found myself sitting next to writer Marion Winik. The two of us began talking about, of course, our children.

"Someday," I said, "I'm going to get a call from Social Services, but I swear there is something irresistible about baby butts. And not just little baby butts. Even my five-year-old's butt. She has the cutest little butt--I see it and I can't help it--I want to hold her little butt in my hands." I glanced sideways to see if I had confessed to something that would make Marion call the cops, but I was fortunate: I was talking to a fellow mom. "Yeah," she sighed. "Their little bodies are so dear."

This exchange came back to me this morning as I was going through my older daughter's bedroom on my annual Fall Cleaning Frenzy. It's one of those jobs that nobody ever sees or notices, except when it doesn't get done, and that always make me want to launch into Rant Mode--You think that drawer of clothes just bought itself, marched to our house, laundered itself, folded itself and marched up to your bedroom? Think again, sister!--but the truth is, I kind of like doing it. It doesn't rank up there with the goals I set for myself at 19--reforming the nation's penal system, writing the definitive work on Southern Culture--but it is oddly satisfying. I have my orderly piles: misplaced clothes here, giveaways there, store-for-next-year over there. And it always inspires lots of emotions. There's disgust (why do they think I'll never find the soiled underpants stuffed into the back of the drawer? Why do they do that? Why why why?); horror (in the last three months my child has outgrown everything but three pairs of jeans and all but one nice dress); delight (mates found for four socks in the Orphan Sock bag! 'ray!); amazement (some forward-thinking Mom Who Shall Remain Nameless stocked up last March on turtleneck shirts, thank yew Jesus); wistfulness.

There is something about touching the clothes of another person which brings that person to you--some tiny miracle of transubstantiation, maybe, or some alchemy of pheronomes. That was the way it was after my mother died--I still wear her pajamas to bed, because it brings her closer to me somehow. Now, folding shorts my daughter has played in, making neat piles of t-shirts, I feel my big girl's presence with me, even though her body is actually at school four blocks away. And clothes are a reminder of the humbling frailty of the human body, and how it grows, morphs, changes on a child's journey to adolescence and then adulthood. The same dresser I put her clothes in today once housed those tiny, pristine white onsies in stacks, put there by the woman who was not yet a mother for the baby who would come home from the hospital, and that seems like only about two years ago. It's been 10. What Joseph Campbell called "the temporal stream" moves faster at some periods of life than others: when I was 13, a week was an eternity, but now that I am 51, a decade seems like a week. The newborn who fit into those onesies now wants tight blue jeans with sequins and uses as much hair conditioner in a month as my husband would use in a year. And if I don't get back up there and keep sorting, she will be grown and gone before I am done.

And They Say There's No Feedback In This Job

I just had the following conversation with my five-year-old:

Me: "Suzanne, you know what we could do? We could go outside and pick up some really pretty fall leaves, and then take the leaf and lay it on a piece of wax paper. And then--this is the part Mommy would do--we take another piece of wax paper and put it over that, and I iron it to kinda melt the wax together, so the leaf is stuck in between. And then you can hang it up on the window and it's sort of like stained glass."

A moment of reverent silence. Then: "Mom, you're a genius."

Just Say Yes to Drugs

There's an old joke about a horse trainer who was giving his jockey some last-minute advice just before some fancy horse race in England. Just as the trainer pulled a humongous blue pill out of his pocket and fed it to the horse, the race's overseer, the Duke of Marlborough, walked up. "My good man," the duke expostulated, "what in heaven's name do you think you are doing!?"

"Oh, it was nothing, guv," the trainer said, thinking fast. "Just a treat. I eat 'em myself all the time." And he pops one into his own mouth and then offers one to the duke. "Have one yourself, your lordship."

"Hmmm," says the duke, not entirely convinced, but he takes the blue pill, chews on it for a moment and finds nothing immediately remarkable. "Very well," he says. "Good day."

The trainer then turns back to his jockey. "Right," he says. "Now, as I was saying, once you get out of the gate, just go to the outside and give 'im 'is head--because today, the only two animals that can outrun this 'ere horse are me and the Duke of Marlborough."

This old joke occurred to me for some reason as I was waiting at the pharmacy today to fill my fourth prescription for major, heavy-duty painkillers in the last week. In fact, I am Under the Influence right now, which is the only reason I can think of for putting information on the Internet that could make every junkie in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area start thinking about digging out his burgling tools (assuming junkies read blogs, which I'm guess they don't; I'm guessing they probably pawn their laptops to buy, you know, drugs). Anyway, Blue Cross seems remarkably indifferent to my sudden intense interest in Oxycodone and Percocet and, oh hell, I forget what else because I'm slightly high right now. The lady at Giant handed over my new 70-pill prescription without a blink, though I might have detected a certain look of disapproval. Don't know; don't care.

I'm eating these things like candy because a) the knee which I had surgery on a week ago still hurts like a m.f. at time, especially at 4 a.m. (why is that? WHY?) and because b) I have the kind of tolerance for painkilers that normally one sees only in, oh, say, 1,500-pound racehorses. Why is this? I do not know. I know only that I am Medically Unusual. My second child was born while I was under the influence of an epidural which never completely "took," which is sort of like being invited to your own disembowelment, only with a happier outcome. I kept saying, rather anxiously, "I can still feel something," and my husband kept telling the anesthesiologist, "She can still feel things" and the anesthesiologist kept saying, "Ooookay" and twisting little knobs or something, and my baby was out and bathed and in a warm blanket while I was still saying, "I can still feel..." The last thing I can remember from that particular day was the anesthesiologist saying to my husband, "I'm giving her some nitrous oxide. Tomorrow she won't remember any of this." Yeah. Right.

Anyway, this is why I tend to regard a prescription which says "Take one pill every 4-6 hours as needed" not as rigid instructions, but more as a starting point for negotiations. I am not a junkie, truly I'm not, I do not take these things when I don't need them; it's just that when I do need them, I need them a lot more than other people do. Someday, doctors will do some more research and discover that different people process the same medication--who'da thunk it!--differently, and that maybe even things like hormone levels and time of day affect the way the body metabolizes different drugs. I know this for a fact in regards to my own body, but this, I believe, is what scientists regard as "anecdotal evidence." Anyway, enough BUI (blogging under the influence) for me; time for nighty-night. And no, don't call me. I'm not sharing.

The Way It Isn't

How did I wind up here? --Middle aged, that is, and out of work?

Don't get me wrong: in one sense, I have more work than I can possibly do (especially while recuperating from knee surgery). Running a household is w-o-r-k, and no end to it. Important work at that.

But once upon a time I had a career. It had its ups and downs, but for the most part it was a solid, respectable career, and it came with a healthy 401K, and I could look forward to years of steady employment and watching that 401K grow with my matching employer donations. And then this thing happened: I had a baby. I took a year off to watch her grow, because my employer was very lenient and understanding about that, and after a year I planned to come back. But my employer also let me know that when I did come back, I'd be doing something less interesting--a job that looked suspiciously like the work I had been doing at the very beginning of my career, 20 years earlier. I didn't much like that prospect, and I was getting to enjoy this mom thing. So after much anguish, I decided to ask for another year's leave--immediately granted, that should have told me the gig was up right there--and see how well I could do by freelance writing.

Which, after a slow beginning, was pretty well. One year I made $30,000 as a freelancer, a number I cite not because it's so staggering (it was just over a third of my former salary, and no benefits), but because I was able to make that much money without even thinking about it. The kinds of articles the women's magazines wanted back then were a piece of cake for someone like me: I was accustomed to working on deadline and turning out accurate prose on topics much more complicated than "how to buy a cellphone." I was making money and hardly realizing I was working. My husband and I were living within our means, which meant we did not live in a fashionable part of town, but we liked where we lived and we liked our small house, and things were fine.

Then came kid number two--a surprise, but a delightful one, and then I took some time off to be a mom to her full-time, and then, somehow, getting back in the saddle wasn't so easy. By this time, my employer and I had pretty much parted company, in a listless "see ya later" kind of way. I had tried to find ways to fit in around my old shop on a part-time basis, but I'd met a brick wall. That hurt, but I decided it was okay; pumped up on my recent $30,000-in-one-year experience and kept afloat by my husband's medical insurance, I figured I could do just fine, and I was liking my freedom. But something was happening to the little niche of the magazine world where I had found a home: the appetite for anything that looked remotely like fact-based journalism was evaporating. What was taking its place was celebrity interviews and, increasingly, "psychological" articles citing "experts" that purported to give the final word on spanking (or not), developing empathy, the Power of Intuition....puff pieces that made me feel fraudulent writing them because I knew how little actual information they contained. The end came one day at Barnes and Noble, when I sat down for a cup of coffee and read an entire article in a women's magazine before realizing I had written it.

For several months, I floundered, and then an idea I had rejected as uninteresting suddenly began to look interesting after all, and whaddya know, I turned it into a book proposal and sold it. The day I got the word from my agent about the deal I came out of my office screaming and pumping my fists. "What is it, mom?" asked my oldest, who was then about six.

"MOM'S BACK IN THE GAME, BABY!" I yelled, and we all danced around, even though the kids didn't really know what the fuss was about. Oh, God, what a sweet moment: I was a mom, AND I had a career, on my own terms. Life rocked.

Which brings us to the present: the book is out, it's selling in respectable numbers, the checks from the publisher have come in (all but one, and it won't be large, and it will be months and months from now before I see it)...and, since my book (like most books) has not hit the best-seller list, I know that this is pretty much all the money I will ever see from it. Even with a nice advance, which I got, the money goes. It gets spent on doctor's office co-pays and kids' clothes and summer camp and plumbing disasters and income taxes. My huge $150,000 advance for this book (in the writing world, that's considered very nice--million dollar advances are the ones you hear about but most writers never see that kind of money) now consists of about $4,000 tucked away in a savings account. I am one major car repair bill away from that most hateful position to be in: totally dependent on my husband's money. (And I don't care how egalitarian your marriage is, both partners KNOW who is bringing in the bucks. Nobody has to say a thing.)

So: here I am, a 51-year-old journalist with tons of experience and awards and honors from Back in the Day (that 1987 Pulitzer finalist thing sounds quaint now, it was so long ago) who, if I were to show up at my old job now, might score a nice lunch with an editor but they know and I know I ain't getting hired back there. I am Not Needed; they are paying people my age to go away these days, because newspapers are never profitable enough for Wall Street, and Wall Street calls the shots these days. (I remember the old days when newspapers were not supposed to be "profit centers," when they used their unique positions as the only business in our society afforded constitutional protection to advance agendas bigger than making money. But that was a long time ago.) There's always the possibility of another book--if I can think of something marketable, which is a big if; there's magazine work, if I can bring myself to write the kind of article they want these days, which is so forgettable even I forget I've done it. I could get a part-time retail job to bring in some cash, and give up on using the skills I worked so long and hard to acquire. I could quit complaining and settle into Middle-Aged Momhood, as so many women before me have done.

My only problem is that I have this burning desire to be Useful. I have things I want to say, skills I want to pass on. How to do this? It's one thing when you're 21 and have no responsibilities and nothing but time on your hands, and even though the path before you is steep there's something exciting about tackling it. It's another when you're 51 and there are college tuitions looming in your future--and, what's worse, the last 10 years of your working life have been largely spent doing work that our society does not value. At 21, you're a hot young find; at 51, you're just a mom. You exited the fast track and now there are no "on" ramps. And I look around me and see dozens of women my age, in a similar position to me, scrambling for piecework--women with advanced degrees, women with priceless experience, women with superior intellects.

And I think: how wasteful can this society afford to be?

The Knee, the Back, the Neck

They're all going out on me at once. I feel like a jalopy that gets a flat and just when I get the spare tire on, the door falls off or the spark plugs (do cars still have spark plugs? I think not) get fouled...or something. Went in for surgery today on my knee and it hurt like a m--well, it hurt. A lot. And this was just orthoscopic surgery, mind you, the outpatient kind where the doc goes in and repairs some cartilage and gets rid of whatever it was that grated, bone on bone, when I walked downstairs. The other knee needs work, too, or will eventually. Plus I now have arthritis in my lower back and in my neck. All of this would get ever so much better if I lost weight, which is hard to do when it hurts to walk around. Hence the surgery(ies).

Not a fun week.

But I have to keep in mind why I'm doing it: to get back on my exercise program, to feel better, to get rid of pain instead of just quietly succumbing to it, to remember what it is to walk for five miles and not have to limp home. I have two kids, for Chrissake! I can't get old right now! There's a lot of running around I have to do yet! I have a neighbor across the street who's had trouble with his knees, too, and I saw him a week after far more serious surgery, slowly making his way up the hill with a walker. This is a guy I usually see on a bike. I know he didn't particularly relish the thought of hobbling up the street looking with a walker, wearing those lovely white stockings they give you to keep the blood from pooling in your veins, but by God he was out there, using those muscles...and now he's back on his bike. He's 10 years older than me and if he can do it, I can too.

My Buddhist friend writes, "I see the journey toward wholeness as really just a journey of remembering who we really are, down deep." This is not easy when you were raised on a diet of "You are going to hell if you don't shape up"....the plight of Fundamentalists everywhere, in any variety of religions. I would say that whoever introduced that notion, all these thousands of years, ago, was immensely Fucked Up (except of course in Buddhist thought they can't be, because in Buddhism, my friend tells me, human beings are all perfect and whole and interconnected already. This is a  conundrum, which maybe somebody, someday, will explain to me). "This is known as Big Mind in Zen....So you are in the perfect place, in the perfect situation to do the practice you need to do! Everything that is presenting itself to you is there by design. It is a grand opportunity."

Okay, I'll buy that last part. I will do this. I will. Right after two more Percocet.

Answer That! It Might Be the Phone!

If Bill Gates had invented the telephone, the user's manual would be twice as thick as the phone book and we'd all be busy rebooting 14 times a day. Fortunately, Alexander Graham Bell took a more user-friendly approach, which means that phones are things that even preschoolers can use with ease. And they do. There was the time my oldest, then three, managed to get hold of the phone upstairs and hit the pound key several times, just to see what happened. What happened is that it activated the "panic button" on our burglar alarm. Three county police cars showed up, and the cops in them were not amused. Another morning, several years later, I got a call from my husband, who was at his office. "Do you know where your cellphone is?" "Why?" I asked. He had just picked up his cellphone and, hearing soft little pants on the other end, thought at first he had a very shy phone sex lady on his hands. Then another thought occurred.... Sure enough, I went looking and found my youngest perched halfway up the stairs, having just figured out the speed dial function. Then there was the time I left my cellphone on "vibrate" and sat it on my desk. My husband called me while I was, mentally speaking, about 4,000 miles away--and suddenly this black metallic thing is buzzing and crawling towards me. I haven't been so terrified since the night I walked through a darkened living room and found Crawling Minnie Mouse slowly working her way across the carpet, lights glowing and a little singsong voice emanating from her batteries. I'm surprised the neighbors did not hear the screams. Actually, I'm surprised my heart is still beating.

My problem with cellphones, aside from the fact that they can scare the living crap out of you, is that they keep getting smaller and smaller, which means the little buggers get easier and easier to lose. If you're quick on the uptake, and act before the batteries run out, you can call yourself on a land line and just follow the ringy dingy...at least until the answering service, which you so efficiently signed up for, cuts it off. My cellphone gets four rings before the answering service kicks in. One day I lost my cellphone and, using the Calling Yourself method, tracked it down to the west half of the house...and then it quit. Went back, dialed again, raced back to where I'd been before, figured out the sound was probably coming from my office--and then it quit. Went into my office, dialed again, and....the sound was fainter. Hmmmmm. Dialed again, went into the hall: louder. But WHERE? Dialed again. This time the noise was coming from...BEHIND the toilet. No, it was not I who left it there.

Now the latest thing are these little thingys you can just attach to your ear, like something out of Star Trek--a phenomenon which led recently to an item in the Washington Post describing a fight in a local nightclub which began when one man greeted another who was wearing one of those earphone thingys with the line, "How you doin', my Vulcan brother?" Now I thought that was funny, but Vulcan Brother didn't: he beat the shit out of the guy who was trying to be friendly, leading to a) a short hospital stay for the wiseacre and b) a longer sojourn in jail for Vulcan Brother. I say, if you don't want to hear cracks like that, don't wear weird metallic things sprouting from your ears. I am always amazed that anyone would be interested in becoming a walking phone accessory, but not only are people doing this in droves, some of them are actually wiring themselves up so that all incoming calls are automatically answered. This means that while you're talking to them you never know when you're going to get bounced, so to speak, for an urgent request for advice from the girlfriend standing in front of the shoe rack at Nordstrom's. It's gotten so that when you're cruising the produce aisle and somebody nearby suddenly says "Hey!", all friendly, you can no longer assume they are talking to you; they are just as likely to be talking to their insurance adjustor on the other side of town. I find this whole phenomenon baffling, and more than a little frightening. I know people who take serious psychotropic meds to keep strange voices OUT of their heads, but I know even more people who pay big bucks to actually pipe them in. Who is crazier? To me, this is a no-brainer. 

The only thing more frightening to contemplate--and you know this is coming--is hoardes of teenagers roaming the malls, Bluetooths attached to the sides of their heads, mouths in constant motion. They will all be talking to each other...on the phone. Your teenager will be all over you like white on rice to get the same thing. You will have two choices: give in, or move to Amish country, where they allow phones but keep them in a special little shed separate from the house. I know where I'm going.

 

 

Momwork

My sister has no children. Heh. Heh.

Actually, my sister and her husband did me and my husband a very great favor last week by flying up from Georgia to kid-sit for four days while my husband and I took in the fall colors in Park City, Utah (site of the Park City Literary Festival). But I wouldn't be a card-carrying Mom if I didn't confess to a sneaky little frisson of "wait'll they see" kind of glee, contemplating how a) my husband and b) my sister and her husband were going to manage while I was away.

The short answer: they did just fine.

The longer answer: I wrote a two-page memo before I left, detailing the how's and where-to's of household life--things like: when the five-year-old had her pre-op physical (she had tubes put in her ears yesterday, it went fine; the surgery was at 8 and by 2 p.m. she was the Energizer Bunny again); the forms to take to said pre-op physical; the rules associated with computer use; advice on excavating backpacks and what to do with items found therein; the phone number of the Responsible Fifth Grader who can be relied upon to produce homework assignments my nine-year-old forgets; what medications to give and when; how to access to county's online homework help should the need arise; bath routines; bedtime routines; names and numbers of potential playmates for the weekend; what to do with the trash and recyclables; names and numbers of doctors. Oh yeah, and signed forms for a) the school, b) the after-care program and c) a general form saying it was legal for my sister/bro-in-law to take them to get medical care.

My husband is a hands-on dad who has been known to miss meetings at work to take a kid to the pediatrician (pause for moment of reverent silence, followed by round of cheers and applause). But even my husband did not know about the pre-op forms, didn't have the phone numbers of the friends, didn't know about the online homework access until I set it up, wouldn't have known who to call if my nine-year-old lost her assignments, and did not think about needing the other letters for school, after-care and potential medical personnel.

I'm not trying to paint myself as the Center of the Universe here; if I'd just left town, la-di-da, without compiling all this info, we'd have all survived. As it was, my husband got the five-year-old to her pre-op physical right on time, but forgot the paperwork (something I could see myself doing). It was okay: the pediatrician faxed everything the ear-nose-throat doc needed, and it worked out just fine. My sister and her husband seemed to have a fine time with the kids (though I did detect a distinct note of cheerful "gotta go!" relief when it was time for them to leave for the airport.) But I have to say, I did derive a perverse sense of satisfaction from writing down all I do on an everyday basis and seeing just how much WORK it added up to--work which often seems to be invisible to the world at large, and only intermittently visible even to my nearest and dearest.

Can I hear an "amen"??

Mr. Woolcott's Plausible Deniability

Okay, I'm back in town, and I'm pissed. Specifically, I'm pissed over James Woolcott's cover story in the Oct. 2 issue of The New Republic on the subject of (here we go again) the Mommy Wars, in which The New Republic belatedly gets around to assessing the relative merits of the most recent books by Caitlin Flanagan, Linda Hirshman and Leslie Morgan Steiner. Woolcott professes to be mystified by all the ruckus these books have produced among America's moms. "Men are competitive with other men, but less comparison-oriented," he writes. " We don't understand why so many women are so avid to sit in moral judgment of other women's difficult choices, why they care so much about what other women do (often women they barely know), and why so many of those women are writers."

Well, let me explain. Ever hear of the crab-bucket syndrome? When crabs get caught and tossed in a bucket, destined to be gutted and/or parbroiled alive, a couple of crabs always try to crawl out...and the other crabs always grab hold of the would-be escapee, and haul him (or her) back in. Why this happens in seafood is beyond my expertise, but in human terms the way it works is that when you are a member of an oppressed group, it is in the interests of those doing the oppressing to keep you fighting with each other as much as possible, so as to distract you from seeing the real enemy....and, just maybe, getting yourself out of that bucket. Hence the Mommy Wars.

So (heaving a heavy sigh), for the benefit of Mr. Woolcott and others, let's go through it again:

The so-called "mommy wars" is a media construct which pits women against women in an artificial "one way is better" argument. The reason so many of the women making most of the noise are writers, Mr. Woolcott, is that they are part of the media--and writers usually try to write what sells, at least some of the time. (Even the very high-minded among us need to pay bills.) Meanwhile, two very large groups--I speak of "fathers" and "corporate executives"--sit on the sidelines, enjoying the catfight. As well they should: as long as women are egged on into attacking other women about the "choices" they've made (as if they are real choices), dads (far too many of them, anyway, my husband NOT included) and employers get a free pass. They don't have to wipe butts, they don't have to figure out how to get the kid to the pediatrician AND make the 4 p.m. meeting, they don't have to explain those "gaps" in the resume that are death to anyone who has dropped out of the paid labor force to raise children; they'll never have to look at a Social Security wage statement that counts the hardest-working years of their lives as, economically speaking, a big fat zero. They don't even really have to actively oppress women--they've got us doing that scutwork, too.

I never thought I'd hear myself say it, but: Caitlin, Linda and Leslie are tools of the patriarchy. Yep, that's what I said. They're just too dumb to know it, which I seriously doubt, or too unreflective to realize it (which is Leslie Morgan Steiner's problem, I suspect), too doctrinaire to think about things any other way (Linda Hirshman) or--and I believe this especially in the case of Caitlin Flanagan--too sly to own up to the game.

Any way you look at it, though, it's pretty damn depressing.