| | | Lena goes deep on kewpie dolls, talking to your kids about racism in the age of Trump, and more. | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | March 14, 2017 | Letter No. 77 | | | | | | | | | | | | Hey Lennys,
A couple of weeks ago, I disabled my Twitter account for the first time since I joined almost a decade ago (omg, have I really spent a decade on Twitter?). I needed to take a break from the news, and from life, and from the general Hunger Games that sometimes plays out on social media. I wanted to see what other things my brain could occupy itself with when it wasn't feeling that constant need to refresh, refresh, refresh.
At first, I felt guilty. How could I choose to not know what's going on with the world, especially, you know, in these times? But I realized that a general knowledge that shit will always be fucked is OK to live with for a few weeks (plus, it's not like I left the Internet altogether, so I wouldn't remain completely ignorant).
The results have been positive. I have read more in the past three weeks than I had in the previous six months, at least, and although I didn't write as much as I wanted to, I feel like at least my brain is slowly preparing for the act of writing soon, which I guess is better than nothing?
Anyway, the whole point of leaving Twitter was to figure out a way to refocus my energies and create new rituals that actually revolve around things I want to do and steer myself away from modern compulsions. Creating new rituals is important, even if sometimes the act of creating the ritual lasts longer than the routine itself. Speaking of impossible rituals, we have Rachel Seville Tashjian's first installment of her beauty column, "Middle Brow" (genius!!), which deals with those impossible morning routines of the rich and famous that always leave me feeling a bit useless. Rachel's writing is funny and full of truths, and I hope you love it as much as I do.
This week's issue is definitely a slow burn of goodness. We also have Lena Dunham's "Out of Print" on Rose O'Neill, the woman who created the Kewpie doll. I have witnessed Lena's Kewpie obsession unfurl in real time (she would text me images of her drawings of Kewpies —remixed! — one in overalls holding an Andrea Dworkin book; another carrying a little Chanel bag with the caption STYLE TAKES NO PRISONERS, and they just brought me SO much joy). Reading about how the original doll came to be was really cool — and surprising! I mean, who would've thought these cherubic, creepy babies had a feminist background?
We also have a beautiful essay from Elsa Collins about having "the talk" about racism with her children. I really enjoyed the nuances that Elsa's particular point of view brought to the story. Elsewhere in the issue, Amy Lyons interviews California state senator Hannah-Beth Jackson, and Christine Lennon writes about how group therapy saved her (it's not a hippie-dippie thing, you'll be glad to know).
I'm really thrilled with the varied stories we put together in this issue, and although I love what we do always, I think even if I didn't work here, this one would feel particularly special. So many of the stories are about knowing when to seek help, when to help yourself, and when to accept help from others. By the time you read this, my social-media sabbatical will probably be over, but I'm happy to report that for the first twelve hours after I revived my account, I didn't feel the need to check it even once. Maybe change is possible after all!
xx
Laia Garcia, deputy editor | | | | | | | | | | | | The Talk | | | | By Elsa Collins | | |
Biracial. Multiethnic. Half-Mexican, Half-black. Or is it half-African American? Depends on who you talk to. I am a first-generation Mexican American (that means I was born here in the United States) married to an African American (who happens to be a quarter–Native American).
Now, what does that make our three kids? Blessed. Or fraught with challenges. Again, depends on the audience. In this day and age, it can be as amazing as marking off the checkbox for diversity that Los Angeles private schools look for, or as awful as hearing other children chant "Build the wall" around your kids.
At the age of four, my parents moved my entire family across the border to Tijuana, Mexico. They wanted us five children to have the cultural experience of growing up in Mexico and attending school there. For my parents, being biliterate as well as bilingual was of the utmost importance. Maybe I was in a bubble growing up in Tijuana. Not only did I miss some of the subtleties of English grammar, I had difficulty identifying the dangling modifier and knowing where its correct place was. But believe it or not, I never really thought about things like "race" in America. I never considered the kinds of behavioral adjustments people needed to make, and continue to need to make today, to live in this society. For example, my husband would often point out to me that we were the only minorities in a restaurant when all I had managed to do was open the menu. Or how I never really considered that someone telling me that my husband and I were "well-spoken" was something other than a genuine compliment.
In Mexico, there isn't as much diversity of race. Most people are Mexican, and the main point of stratification is socioeconomic. So you can imagine the surprise on my very Mexican Catholic mother's face when she met my tall African American boyfriend I had met away at Stanford for the first time. I would love to say it was awe, but it was more like "Qué hiciste?" (What did you do?)
I thought this was as complicated as our relationship would get. Meshing my Mexican family with his strong matriarchal African American family. My husband's grandmother grew up in Louisiana during the Jim Crow laws and would speak of it often to our children. Her form of oral history was one that we cherished. But I don't think she agreed with my decision to speak only Spanish to our children instead of starting with English. But the culture that I see attached to Spanish is something my family cherishes. I may have respectfully disagreed with her and went ahead to speak only Spanish with my kids. They learned English after a week in preschool.
Once we figured that out, I thought: The rest will be easy.
The rest. What a misnomer. Calling that "the rest." Like, here is the universe, and we just need to exist in it. I quickly realized after having our first child that parenting is a nonstop active situation. Your kids are always observing, emulating, imitating, and becoming … just like you. Ergo, you want your kids to nap? You put them down at a certain time. You want them to say "thank you"? Then you better start thanking people. You want them to speak Spanish? Empieza a hablar Español. You want them to be tolerant, thoughtful, empathetic human beings? You cannot teach that. You must be that.
But there are situations now that we must prepare our kids for. Before the election, my husband told me he would need to have "the talk" with the kids about racial issues he wanted them to be prepared for. My husband wanted to have the talk as soon as possible, even though our kids are eight, six, and four. In his mind, it is important for our children to know that it is different growing up black in America at the earliest possible time so they can understand and be prepared for the first time they hear the N-word. He was only in third grade when a white schoolmate first used the N-word to bully him. He wanted them to know how they should act when they are stopped by the police for "driving while black," which has happened to him no less than ten times.
I thought it was too early for our kids. But I probably should have listened, since right after the election, our five-year-old daughter was told by a classmate that she would have to go on the other side of the wall once it was built. She came home from school that day and asked, "Mommy, when do I need to go on the other side of the wall?"
I felt powerless. I wanted to rage at the other child who had said that to her. But then I remembered, She is watching me always. So instead, we had a conversation about why people say things like this. I explained it can be out of fear, misinformation, or sadly in some cases to bully others.
So now I know that it's time for my kids to have the talk, and I need to add to my husband's list of things to be prepared for: how to react when someone tells them to go back to Mexico, or to help build the wall, or asks them if they are legal or to stop speaking Mexican. It's Spanish, I know, but a lot of people don't. Speaking a second language is a gift that I am ecstatic I can share with our children, but when I have been asked to speak English because we are in America, I realize that in many instances, diversity is not celebrated but feared.
My three kids saw me make signs to participate in the #NoBanNoWall protest at LAX. Let me tell you what talking to my kids about protesting does: it allows me to talk about history. How did we become a country of our own, and what role did immigration play in it? It allows me to talk about the origin of religion and how to respect other people's traditions and hope that they respect ours. It allows me to talk about the relationship between Mexico and the United States, and how to interact with people from other countries.
This world is far from perfect, and I am far from perfect. But as long as I am constantly trying to engage in meaningful conversation with my children and encourage them to do the same with others, especially those different from us, maybe, just maybe, a small ripple will become a wave.
Elsa Collins is a social-impact consultant and a graduate of Stanford University and Columbia Law School. | | | | | | | | | | | | Jane Austen Slept 'Til Eight | | | | By Rachel Seville Tashjian | | |
How do I begin my day? I awake at 3:45 a.m. I take a piping-hot shower, followed by a plunge in an extremely cold bath in a tub lined with gold tiles from El Dorado. I read an entire book, then an entire newspaper — and then I eat them both. I run ten miles. I run eight more. I look in the mirror and scream, "I AM ONE DEMANDING CUSTOMER AND LIFE IS BEING SERVED TO ME ON A PLATTER, MEDIUM RARE!" I throw out everything that doesn't bring me happiness, such as money; I read a single email; I tweet something inspiring that usually becomes a law. And then it's time for my 8 a.m. meeting.
How many times have we heard a version of that hellish morning routine from someone crowned by the Internet as one of the "world's most successful people"? It's enough to make you want to throw a dream journal into a fire and meditate to Slayer!
And yet those secret, sacred hours before "the real day begins" retain a certain allure: a surprisingly large sliver of the Internet click-factory is made up of these invigorating dispatches. We want success and productivity and clarity, and for some reason we've come to believe that those are to be found in the hours we'd rather be sleeping or watching What's Opera, Doc? while eating Fruity Pebbles. But instead, we are meant to copy routines that range from the impossibly esoteric to the homogeneously intimidating: Steve Jobs or Oprah or Albert Einstein telling you to get up early, exercise, eat a thing, meditate, and, if all that weren't enough, drink an entire bottle of water. In truth, most of these recommendations don't stray far from what Benjamin Franklin said almost three centuries ago: "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."
But the thing is, Benjamin Franklin had gout. And, even more important, the characters who populate these tortured lists aren't wildly successful because they exercise for two hours and massage their matcha powder with a brush made of preserved spider legs. Perhaps they do these things because they are already wired to think differently, weirdly, ambitiously.
And what if we don't want to be billionaires? What if we just want to be, you know, happy? Are there ways to master the hours of rosy-fingered dawn without orienting our actions so directly toward ambition and success? In other words, is there something between utter sloth — jumping out of bed at the last possible minute and straight into the shower — and the tyranny of the perfected morning? Let's investigate.
Waking up: First of all, I am so excited to tell you that Jane Austen allegedly woke up at the ripe hour of 8 a.m.
Exercise: The most important thing to remember in assembling a morning routine is that just because someone didn't invent the iPhone doesn't mean they weren't doing great stuff before noon. For example, should we all try to be Edie Sedgwick? Let's allow that question to hang rhetorically and just say that she got herself out of bed every morning around 11 a.m. to do ballet stretches while listening to Maria Callas records. This is less jarring than, say, a totalitarian spinning class, and will leave you with more energy to charm at cocktail parties (or a 1 p.m. meeting). And a little Callas in the ears may be the key to supporting a pair of decadent, Sedgwick-esque chandelier earrings!
Meditation: You can think, you can chant, you can be the tree, but then, what better moment for craft time than just before breakfast? Zandra Rhodes, who gave high fashion punk pizzazz in the '70s and '80s, says she does at least one watercolor drawing in the morning, if not two or three.
Breakfast: In Courtney Love's infamous "Grub Street Diet" — which is really the most essential reading, culinary and otherwise — she claims to start her day with toast soldiers and a hot cloth to rub her legs. Doesn't that sound like a much more reasonable ritual than eating charcoal with a minute spork from Japan? Welcome to the dawn of a new day, where rock stars are the ones with the mornings worth imitating!
Get dressed: Confronting one's wardrobe can be a daunting task, especially when your audience is … your business colleagues. Now is the time to employ some truly nonsense mantras. Look in the mirror and do your best Diana Vreeland: FASHION IS FANTASY. It's not the dress, as she once said, but the life you live in it. What would you attempt to wear if you knew you could not fail — in your 10 a.m. meeting, in your 1 p.m. conference call, in your 3 p.m. status update with your boss? Say it aloud: I am in charge of my own destiny and also my own socks! Shoes are the windows to the soul! Fashion fades, but so does the power of Wang Chung's "Dance Hall Days" if you listen to it on repeat for four days straight and don't leave your bedroom! Bathe in Champagne, and drink shampoo! Skirts are the new black! Shirts are the secret to pants! French women don't get mad; they get even, and on Wednesdays, we wear croissants!
The morning hours are ripe with possibility, but they call for a refocusing of our attention. Don't we have enough autocrats speaking over our lives without adding the voice-over of a meditation app? But like watching the sunrise, it's all about having the right perspective. Under proper guidance, even waking up early can feel right: as Toni Morrison told The Paris Review in 1993, "I, at first, thought I didn't have a ritual, but then I remembered that I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark — it must be dark — and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come … And I realized that for me, this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space that I can only call nonsecular." There's the real secret to a successful morning: the most effective rituals are the ones we don't struggle to form into routine.
Rachel Seville Tashjian lives in Soho. | | | | | | | | | | | | Taking it to the Beast | | | | By Amy Lyons | | |
When Hannah-Beth Jackson was seven years old in 1957, she was dismissed from Little League baseball tryouts because she was a girl. In response to the snub, Jackson pedaled her bike home and worked with her parents to create a petition. Clipboard in hand, she walked around her Boston neighborhood asking neighbors to sign her proclamation stating girls should be allowed to play baseball. Naysayers were plentiful — one person even patted her on the head and told her to go home and play with dolls — but at the end of the day, Jackson had a robust list of signatures.
She never heard back from the Little League Commission, which might explain why she went on to become a prosecutor, then an attorney, a member of the California State Assembly, and now a California state senator; she has crafted a career out of going to bat and playing ball.
Representing California's 19th District, which includes Santa Barbara County and western Ventura County, Jackson has written one of the strongest equal-pay laws in the nation, has been an outspoken proponent of fair family leave, and staunchly supported Planned Parenthood as the chair of the California Legislative Women's Caucus. State senator Jackson talked to Lenny about her career, some of her key legislation, and how we should all be making our voices heard.
Amy Lyons: It sounds like speaking truth to power has gotten you to where you are. Could you talk about the balance between speaking up and choosing battles, especially in the age of Trump?
Hannah-Beth Jackson: There has to be a balance, or else you lose your credibility. My mother used to say to me, "You can catch more bees with honey," but I was never one to think of the honey approach. I would say, as I look back on my life, that probably it would have been easier on me if I had perhaps been a little bit more diplomatic. Find the place where you can go to appeal to people without threatening them. That isn't something that is easy to discern. It takes experience. I'm better at it today than I was at twenty. I am no less determined to really express my feelings and have my opinion known, but after thoughtful reflection.
The question today is: How can we, in this era of Trump, get the results that we want, that we deserve, that are going to protect our democracy, that are going to protect the peace and security of the planet?
I think we are dealing with a lunatic. In all candor, and as a politician and as a statesperson and as a senator, that's a pretty strong statement, but the truth is I really think that you can't appeal to someone based upon reason or logic or compassion who is as off as this man is. We just have to take it to him. We have to call upon the people around him, who are essentially spineless, who are essentially willing to save their own political necks when they know that this man is dangerous.
I am hopeful that young people, particularly young women, will recognize how important it is to speak up. To do it in whatever way they feel empowered to make that difference. Young women must recognize how crucial their voices are in this process.
AL: Even before Donald Trump, you were fighting for women's rights. You wrote the California Fair Pay Act to bridge the gender pay gap. What led you to that work?
H-BJ: Many years ago, after I finished law school, about 15 to 20 percent of my colleagues were women. Now it's a much higher number. We still had to fight hard to be recognized and taken seriously. My feminism was really getting activated with things like Roe v. Wade. When I started working in the DA's office in Santa Barbara, I was one of two women in the entire office. They referred to the women in the secretarial pool as girls, but they were all old enough to be my mother. I remember thinking: My mother is not a girl, she's a woman.
This was my first crusade: respect these women. Of course, then I was labeled as one of the feminazis, and I started wearing that moniker quite proudly. I was appointed to serve on the affirmative-action committee because we had no women in any positions of power. Then I was on the county commission for women. That's where the equal-pay issue started for me. Fast-forward about 35 or 40 years, and I finally get a real equal-pay bill on the books.
AL: It has been called one of the strongest equal-pay laws in the nation. What makes the California version stronger than other equal-pay laws?
H-BJ: One, it says equal pay for substantially similar work. California has had an equal-pay bill on the books since 1949, but it used to say equal pay for equal work. The courts define that to mean exactly the same work. Let me give you an example of why that doesn't work: Take a police officer. There have been historical requirements that police officers be able to lift a substantial amount of weight, which reduces the possibilities of some women applying.
So when you look at the job of a police officer, there are instances where physical work comes into play, where the officer has to wrangle with someone and put them in cuffs, but there are other important parts of the job. In fact, when you send a female police officer out on certain kinds of high-risk calls — like a domestic-violence call in which there is no need to physically engage — women historically have higher success rates because they do a much better job of diffusing a volatile situation without violence. So why would we pay a woman officer less because she can't lift 200 pounds? That is why the language of "substantially similar work" is so important.
A second thing that is important about the California Fair Pay Act is related to the Lilly Ledbetter case, in which she had a contract with her employer — as did her colleagues — that prohibited her from talking about her compensation. Ledbetter had no idea that she was being paid less than her male counterparts. Well, the California bill says an employer cannot retaliate against an employee for either asking what their colleagues are being paid or for the colleagues sharing that information. The third thing is that the burden to show that the difference in pay is not gender-based falls on the employer, not the employee.
AL: As chair of the California Legislative Women's Caucus, you've been a big supporter of Planned Parenthood. Is there anything we can do, legislatively and from the perspective of ordinary people, to resist Paul Ryan's plan to defund Planned Parenthood?
H-BJ: Yes. We have to get people to summon the courage to step up. In the districts where there are Republican Congress members, people need to tell their stories, give testimony about how important Planned Parenthood was and is to them, whether it was for a Pap smear, a breast exam, family planning, or reproductive decisions. We need Planned Parenthood, and we need people to demand that their Congress members vote to support Planned Parenthood, not defund it. Also, people need to support Planned Parenthood with a contribution, with assistance, with volunteering, with anything that can be done to keep this critical health-care program alive. I think those are keys: talking to Congress, and giving whatever you can. We have to take this right to the beast.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Amy Lyons's writing has appeared in LA Weekly, Barrelhouse, 100-Word Story, and more. She's working on a book. | | | | | | | | | | | | The Secret Life of Kewpies' Kreator | | | | By Lena Dunham | | | |
| (Illustrations by Lena Dunham, Animation by Laia Garcia) |
A big part of my childhood involved following my mother to flea markets and tag sales so that she could locate and purchase the toys that served as props in her photographic artwork. I would get down on the ground and rummage through cardboard boxes of other children's outgrown effects, looking for something that might strike my mother's fancy. I had a fairly good sense of her taste: whimsical but a little off, strange but not broken. Not creepy dolls in the Victorian sense, but weirdos, with oversize features or too-small feet.
We were thrilled when we found an authentic set of Whimsys (Sally and Tinny Tears, as named by the American Character Doll Company) a grinning, cartoonish doll that was popular in the 1960s before people learned not to give children playthings apt to cause fun-house nightmares. Another favorite was a doll we called "Baby Tired," a cloth-bodied infant with a pug nose and tears creeping toward its contorted open mouth. We knew that revealing my mother's plans for the toys would only jack up the price, so I happily acted like I needed nothing more than a whole bunch of tiny wooden dishwashers. My mother would sometimes surprise me, like when she decided to buy a large box of dirty Princess of Power action figures with matted, Technicolor hair. But I was also surprised by what she rejected, like the time I presented her with a pristine set of Kewpie Dolls. "Oh, no," she said. "Those are kind of overdone."
You know what a Kewpie is, even if you think you don't. They're small, impish babies with single tufts of curled hair, potbellies, exposed butts, and tiny wings. They have been drawn on greeting cards, made into plastic bath toys, and even graced the bottle of their titular mayonnaise (big in Japan). Cute rockabilly girls get them tattooed on their arms beside horseshoes and broken hearts. At this point, the Kewpie is an icon of adorability, even inspiring the psychological concept of "The Kewpie Doll Effect": the stressful idea that mothers will take the best care of infants whose features are exaggerated for maximum adorability, much like a Kewpie, and that these infants will fare better than their less-blessed crib mates.
But behind the Kewpie, a symbol of good old-fashioned American charm, is a woman who defies the suburban normalcy that her creation projects. The Kewpies were created by an iconoclastic illustrator named Rose O'Neill who, through the success of her baby-creatures, became the highest-paid female illustrator of her time, gaining a fortune that allowed her to amass real estate, support her giant Midwestern family, and contribute to the women's-suffrage movement. (She would often use her Kewpies below slogans like VOTES FOR WOMEN, a diapered Kewpie plaintively asking "Do I Get Your Vote?" Talk about subversion tactics.)
Rose Cecil O'Neill was born in 1874 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the second of seven children. She was raised in rural Nebraska, where, at age thirteen, she won the Omaha Herald's children's drawing competition. By age fifteen, she was the breadwinner in her family, supporting them via professional commissions like a man twice her age might. When she was nineteen, her father, sensing he had a star on his hands, escorted her to New York City, where he thought she'd have even greater success. He left his prodigal daughter in the care of the Sisters of Saint Regis.
The nuns would often accompany a naïve O'Neill to visit editors and art directors. Her popularity rose as a magazine illustrator (the primary visual media of the time); she was famed for her delicate drawings and playful, knowing captions. This success allowed her to help purchase a homestead for her family in the Ozarks, which they would call Bonniebrook. On a visit to Nebraska, O'Neill met her first husband, Gray Latham, a charming layabout whose excessive spending led to the loss of Rose's fortune. By the time she was 27, they were divorced, and she had returned to Bonniebrook, the fourteen-room mansion her generosity had built.
O'Neill's second husband entered stage left soon after, wooing her with anonymous letters and gifts until revealing his identity as Harry Leon Wilson, an assistant editor at Puck Magazine, where Rose had been on staff. After she accepted his coy advances, the pair moved to Bonniebrook, but by 1907, their relationship was over. Thirty-three and twice divorced, having already gained and lost a fortune, O'Neill had still not summoned the creation that would cement her legacy.
The Kewpies came to Rose in a dream. She could see them, dozens of flying baby cupids, mussed and smiling, swarming around her in her bed. She later described the characters thusly: "A sort of little round fairy whose one idea is to teach people to be merry and kind at the same time." Their name was derived from the word cupid, only if your cupid got you into trouble, the Kewpies were meant to bail you out.
The images were an instant sensation, and between cartoons, dolls, paper dolls (Kewpie Kutouts), and various licensing partnerships for housewares, snacks, and baby toys, O'Neill remade her fortune in spades, earning $1.4 million dollars (roughly the equivalent of $15 million in 2017 money. She was legitimately rich). Rose, considered arrestingly beautiful and often called "the Queen of the Bohemian Scene," split her time between Bonniebrook and a social hub of an apartment on Washington Square Park that inspired the hit Broadway song "Rose of Washington Square": "They call me Rose of Washington Square / I'm withering there, in basement air I'm fading."
But the grandeur came to an end as Rose fell victim to a problem familiar to modern stars (mo money, mo problems is right). She supported her family as well as a large creative entourage, and she believed her own hype, spending like the money would never stop. First came the Great Depression, then the introduction of photography to magazines and ad campaigns. O'Neill tried to re-create her original success with a Buddha-esque baby doll she dubbed Little Ho Ho, but the original Kewpie effect could not be replicated, and she moved back to Bonniebrook, where she was a notable and glamorous — if bedraggled — celebrity in her Missouri town.
In 1944, at age 69, Rose died. She was destitute, living with a nephew, though she had continued to encourage arts education and push for women's equality until the end of her life. The Broadway song about her puts it best: "Foes, I've plenty of those / With secondhand clothes, and nice long hair! / I've got those Broadway vampires last to the mast / I've got no future, but oh! What a past. I'm Rose of Washington Square."
Lena Dunham's obsession with ceramic infants carries on from childhood into her fast approaching middle age. | | | | | | | | | | | | The Tuesday Night Margarita Club | | | | By Christine Lennon | | |
I first heard Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein, who delivers mindfulness wisdom with a comforting, Jewish-grandmother-from-Brooklyn accent, in my car. I was listening to On Being With Krista Tippett, the Mother Superior of all podcasts about spirituality. Boorstein encouraged listeners to treat themselves with the compassion and empathy they would offer a cherished, trusted friend. "Imagine you are sitting beside yourself," she said quietly, with those elongated, slightly nasal vowels, "and you put your arm around your shoulders, and say, 'Sweethawwt, you're in pain.'"
It struck me in that moment how far I had come. Not literally. I had been stuck on a mile-long stretch of Beverly Boulevard for what felt like a week. But I had friends, real-life, arm-around-the-shoulder friends. Just a handful of years before, when my twins were very young, I had been struggling with reentering the workforce. Since I am a freelance magazine writer and author, the "workforce" is my laptop and Wi-Fi. And I felt desperately lonely.
My closest friends were childless party people, had older kids, or lived in another state. I was exhausted and confused, questioning whether spending time away from my kids for little to no pay, and hiring someone to care for them while I stared at a blank screen and panicked about feeling creatively bankrupt, was worth it. All I wanted back then was a Zen Jewish grandmother to give me sage advice and a friend or two I could trust in the trenches with me, but I had no idea how to find them.
Making trusted mom friends is a task that's swimming in vulnerability. You have to leave the house to do it, for one. At birthday parties and mommy-and-me classes, not environments known for intimacy, you have to fine-tune your radar to pick up on signals from like-minded people. Most challenging of all, you have to let people know that you need them, or need anyone, and I wasn't into that sort of thing. I used to describe myself as "independent," and say that I preferred to figure out my problems on my own. But, thanks to my other car-therapy friend, Brené Brown, I understand that I was caught in that famous straitjacket of perfectionism. I hadn't yet realized that asking for help made me look strong, not weak.
I could lie and say that I set an intention and the Universe (capital U) delivered them to me, but what actually happened was more mundane. When my kids were three, I got an email from a good, but not yet cherished, friend asking if I wanted to join her in group therapy. She was putting together a small group of artist mothers to meet monthly under the guidance of a therapist, Deborah Stern. What the four of us would do and talk about in her office was unclear, but I knew it would be a break from the isolation, and I suspected that it might push my limits of comfortable social interaction, and I needed both of those things, badly.
I should say that I always thought group therapy was total bullshit. It was a cheap construct for a sad reality show, or a one-season sitcom, and a concept which, IMHO, reached its cultural nadir around the third season of Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew. It was a setup used to plumb the depths of narcissists' pain for ratings. It's fair to say that I was wary. All of us were. So much so that on the night of our first get-together, the four of us stopped at El Carmen, a Mexican dive in West Hollywood, for a pregame drink. The Tuesday Night Margarita Club was born.
I am reluctant to even write about what happened in Deb Stern's office over the years we met, because I don't want to betray the trust that developed there. I can say that, slowly, we started sharing our most personal stories, about our own mothers, our weakest moments as parents, our power struggles with our spouses, and our doubts about our own abilities or talent. We also used the forum as a pressure release for the day-to-day tedium. There's something oddly satisfying about admitting to furiously shredding a spaghetti squash while you ignored your wailing children, or how you stopped speaking to your husband for a full day when he counted the number of dog shits you failed to clean up in the yard while he was working long hours and you were home with two small kids clinging to your sanity.
Every mother needs a safe space to share her grief over the loss of her former life as a person who could stay out past eleven and travel freely, who scribbles ideas in her journals instead of grocery lists; and to know that bitching about it doesn't diminish her love for her family. And no one, really, no one, wants to listen to the complaints of a mother who can afford the privilege of staying home with her kids, with a regular sitter on call, except for other mothers in the same position.
"I think you all needed help dealing with that painful split, the difficulty of trying to do creative work and also be a mother," says Deb Stern, who is, like Sylvia Boorstein, a Jewish grandmother. I called her to ask about the group, now that we have some distance and perspective, and how she thought we all grew and changed together. "You also needed to open up the lines of communication and bond. All of you were in the same boat. You had incredibly high expectations of yourselves as parents, but you weren't competitive with each other. It's relatively new in our culture for people to even try to do everything your generation is doing, to work and take care of your kids at that level and make your own yogurt. I think that my purpose was to tell you that your feelings were all normal, and to tell you where your kids were, developmentally, and that their behavior was also normal. I brought some perspective. I think that's how a therapist can be useful in this situation."
It took a few sessions for me to ditch the self-deprecating jokes, the polite nodding, all the usual blockades I threw down to keep people at a safe distance. Eventually, I stopped trying to come up with a clever response to every story they told, another annoyingly evasive move. I don't remember exactly when it shifted, but I realized that these women deserved more than that. It wasn't always smooth sailing. But most of the time, they listened to me divulge all the ways I wasn't perfect, that sometimes I yelled at my kids and felt like a failure at work and shirked away when my husband tried to touch me, and not only did they still like me, they liked me more.
Gradually, our support for each other moved from the abstract to the tangible. We helped each other get out of the house when we needed it, offering a desk in a shared office space or a lunch date. We celebrated the birth of two babies and passed along hand-me-downs. We mourned a failing marriage. We listened. Deb also reminded me that my three friends in that room were among the first people to read the objectively embarrassing first draft of my novel, which is being published this month.
"For you, it was about writing the book, and the hard times you went through finishing it, and facing rejection, and the hell you put yourself through," she says. "But you had that group of people telling you that you had to go on and do this. Everyone was behind it, and behind you."
By the time I was listening to On Being in my car, the four of us were in deep. When the room filled with darkness (it did) or tears (yep), we would break the tension with our best Boorstein impression. One sweethawwt is all it took to get us back in the moment, laughing through the weird anguish, understanding that we wouldn't have to bear it, any of it, alone. Deb assured us, and we assured each other, that giving up, on work, on our kids, on each other, wasn't an option. Because we took the time to be our own people and engage in fulfilling work and nurture our own lives separate from our children, we would be better parents. Because we took the time to make real and lasting connections to other mothers we could trust, we would be better, more open people.
Christine Lennon is a Los Angeles–based writer. The Drifter, published by William Morrow, is out this month. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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