| |  | | | | November 28, 2017 | Letter No. 114 | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | | In this week's Lenny:
—Jancee Dunn writes a piece about how mothers — and all women — really need alone time. Jancee was raised thinking that only men needed time to themselves, and she brought that stereotype into her own life as a mother, until she realized that martyrdom was making her miserable.
—Next, we have the novelist Hala Alyan on how, as a recent immigrant in Oklahoma, she fell in love with the larger-than-life wrestlers of the WWE. As she puts it, perfectly: "I didn't believe in Superman or Santa Claus, but I believed in Shawn Michaels."
—Minda Harts, the CEO and founder of the Memo, writes an essay about how she felt excluded from other career-development businesses, which never dealt with the specific challenges that women of color face as they try to make their way up the career ladder.
—Mikaella Clements describes driving around New Zealand for three weeks in a motor home with her family of six, and maintaining her skin-care routine as a way to also maintain her sanity.
—Finally, we have Gracie Linden's charming essay about living in a London boardinghouse, just like Jo March from Little Women did when she moved to New York.
| | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | Women Are Supposed to Give Until They Die | | | | By Jancee Dunn | | |
When you have a kid, all sorts of buried beliefs that you didn't even realize you had suddenly bob to the surface. It's especially jarring if you consider yourself a more freewheeling type, because often they have a more traditional slant: after years of complete uninterest, suddenly religion, or seeing more of your relatives, or having regular family dinners, becomes more important to you.
For me, motherhood brought up all these dusty, retro beliefs about gender that were lurking in my psyche — the most prevalent being that men, much more than women, need "alone time."
It started the week that I had our daughter — when, in an amazing coincidence of timing, my husband Tom decided to take up long-distance cycling. On weekends, he would disappear for six-hour rides — that is, when he wasn't training for a marathon, another new hobby. When he became a dad, his social life didn't really change. He traveled the country for group bike trips. At night, he met friends at bars and restaurants while I stayed home. In the morning, he'd go for a run while I got up with the baby.
Before we had become parents, our relationship was fairly egalitarian and drama-free. But after the baby came, I was seething with resentment pretty much all the time. I couldn't even look at his Instagram posts of bike trips to the Guatemalan jungle or the Italian Alps ("5000 feet of climbing to go. #dolomites"). So why didn't I open my mouth? Because I really did believe that it was vital for him to have time to himself. This widespread idea has fueled an entire industry of Man Cave construction (type in that phrase on Houzz, and 300,000 renditions pop up, including one hideaway that's basically a staircase that descends into a hole in the ground).
Part of this belief sprang from my own upbringing, which was traditional: My mom stayed at home while my dad worked as a manager at J.C. Penney. At nights and on weekends, my father would regularly head to his toolshed or the garage, bringing his transistor radio and a cooler of beer. My two sisters and I were told not to "bother him" because his alone time was sacred. He's now 75 and still needs to escape the rest of us: During the last family gathering we had at my parents' house in New Jersey, I went to their basement to change a load of laundry (yes, at age 51, I still wash my clothes there, rather than in the dank laundry room in my building). When I snapped on the basement light, there was my father, standing in the dark. It was sort of creepy.
"Are you OK, Dad?" I asked.
"What? Oh, sure," he said cheerfully. He was just grabbing a moment away from his sugared-up grandchildren. Actually, it was more than a moment. He might have been down there for an hour, just standing there. Maybe he'd reorganized a little? I don't know.
Meanwhile, I don't remember my mother ever tinkering in some room by herself.
Throughout my life, I had heard that men needed alone time from tons of other women. I wondered: Why do we tell ourselves that? Could there be some sort of evolutionary reason why men feel the need to escape — to scan the horizon for predators or something?
So I did some research — and, surprise, found out that this notion wasn't true. Among other experts I talked to, Joseph Henrich, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, was stumped. "I cannot think of any evolutionary approaches that might illuminate this," he told me.
Yet not only did I co-sign this behavior but I made the situation worse, courtesy of another retro idea that floated up from the ether: that women were fine without alone time. (This despite a 2013 Pew Research survey that found that women have five fewer hours of leisure time per week than men, and a new study commissioned by the National Institutes of Health that revealed that women are almost twice as stressed as men.)
For the first few years of my child's life, I made sure that I was a few feet away from her at all times. Slowly, I stopped seeing friends, rarely exercised, never took a trip for a weekend or even a night. What if she needed something? So I was around. Burned out and pissed off, but around. When I got snappish, Tom did notice, and he would encourage me to take a walk or go to a movie alone (once my favorite things to do). But in most cases, I declined.
Because a good mother is a selfless mother, right? I took two-minute military showers ("I'm coming!" I would yell if anyone called, hastily soaping and rinsing). If I had any pockets of free time, I felt compelled to do something useful, such as pick up dinner supplies or buy kids' socks — something sociologists call "time contamination," which is much more likely to afflict women. I realized that I had taken the idea to an extreme when I noticed that if I was eating crackers out of a box, I would eat only the broken ones and save the whole ones for my husband and kid. Which is bonkers.
When I met the author Caitlin Moran not long ago at a book event, she told me as much. "There is this massive underlying belief that a woman will never run out of love and care and attention — that they should be able to give until they die," she said, stomping around the room in her Doc Martens. "Without any point where you go, 'That's enough.'"
That point came for me one Saturday afternoon when I overheard my daughter (you know, because I was three feet away) telling Tom that "dads do the fun stuff, and moms do the boring stuff." Because for all of my soaring speeches about how girls can do anything and the future is female, what she saw was her mother constantly putting herself last. Doing the boring stuff. As James Baldwin wrote, "Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."
And my relentless self-sacrifice was souring my relationship with my husband. As my world shrank to the confines of our small Brooklyn apartment, our conversations mostly revolved around logistics. Our sex life was in the toilet. (Important as that may seem, a long-term study from the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan found that lack of alone time is a bigger cause of unhappy marriages than a lousy sex life). And because I rarely left Tom alone with our kid, I was sending him a constant message that I didn't trust his capabilities — a behavior that sociologists call "maternal gatekeeping," where mothers control or limit the father's involvement. How was he supposed to learn anything if I was hovering over him while he changed a diaper, pointing out that he missed some major fecal matter in the creases?
It should have been obvious to me that the craving for alone time is not a male impulse but a human one. Studies link it to greater life satisfaction and better handling of stress. It's crucial to enjoy your own company: to go on a meandering walk, to do something in which you're totally immersed in a creative flow. But it has to be truly solo: As one sociology professor told me, you must fully commit and leave the damn house. You can't shut the door and scroll through a website, because someone is just going to open the door and ask you where the Sun Chips are.
My mom used to love to paint and sculpt and do yoga and write stories, but that all dribbled away when she had three kids. If you had asked me when I was a teen if my mom had any hobbies or passions, I would have been stumped. Recycling, maybe? She's always sorting stuff. Or decluttering? Back then, I didn't think about my mom's inner life too much, but during the same family visit where I found my dad in the basement, I asked her about that time period. She admitted that yes, she had been a little bitter (with the usual mom caveat of Not That I Would Change Having You Girls). "I kept telling myself that I'd pick up on all that stuff again when you went to college," she said, as I made us some tea in the kitchen. In other words, I told her, you put all of your interests on hold for two decades. "Well, when you put it that way, it's depressing, isn't it?" she said. We sipped our tea in silence as we looked around her kitchen, now covered in her artwork. "Huh," said my mom, after a minute.
I don't want to repeat this pattern in my own life, so with sustained effort, I've stopped sublimating my own needs. I go away for the weekend and leave the kid with my husband. She protested at first, but now she has developed a whole set of rituals and in-jokes with him that would not have happened if I had been lurking in the living room. I see friends for dinner. I do things that connect with my earlier, pre-kid self (the good, creative parts, not the part that went out with a guy whose signature greeting was "What's crappening?"). I go on long, solitary bike rides, work out my problems, brainstorm with myself, and return happier and more present. I've learned to be protective and respectful of my free time, just as Tom is. I take long showers and lock the bathroom door. I see weekend movie matinees. I eat the whole crackers.
Jancee Dunn is the author of How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids. | | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | I'm Tired of White Women As the Face of Career Development | | | | By Minda Harts | | |
I have always been entrepreneurial. I remember being in the sixth grade and wanting to go to the movies with my friends, but my parents didn't have the money. "Everybody's going!" I said in frustration, but our family just couldn't swing the cost.
I quickly paced around my house and noticed some floral wreaths that someone had made for my mom. "These are nice!" I took them out of the house and went door to door selling them until I'd made enough money to go to the movies. Of course, my mom was not pleased, but I had a great time and had extra to buy popcorn and soda. From that day forward, I never let money — or a lack of it — get in my way.
Fast-forward to the career I had for twelve years, starting fresh out of school: I was a philanthropic adviser, helping high-net-worth individuals give their money to impactful projects at universities and colleges. In this field, I was often the only woman of color in the room. I became numb to not seeing other women who looked like me. I accepted the lack of diversity and thought it must be normal. I felt like Tiffany Haddish; maybe I was the last black unicorn!
Then, one day, it hit me like a ton of bricks. It was around the time Lean In came out. A group of colleagues (white women) formed a Lean In group, and I was never invited to it. At that point, I realized that career development was not created equal. And that "women" didn't always mean women of color.
It made me tired. I was tired of not seeing women of color in executive roles and tired of white women being the only face of career development. Somehow, we had become invisible, not even hidden figures! At the time, the go-to career platforms were Levo, the Muse, and others, and white women had founded them. They were preaching to "all women," and as we know, equality in the workplace is not created equal. If I hear one more white woman tell me how to negotiate my salary or play the game, I am going to scream!
Don't get me wrong, I received a lot of fantastic career advice from these platforms, but women of color face unique challenges. For starters, the wage gap. The often quoted 77 cents on a dollar for women does not include women of color: Black women make 63 cents, and Latinas make 54 cents. Second, we hold fewer board seats and senior management positions than white women do, and it's just hard to see yourself as a leader when the women representing you don't share your experiences. I can take the advice of any successful woman, but when I see another black woman or brown woman who has been successful telling me I can do it, it means I can do it too, just like they did. White women will never be called "the angry black woman," or told their natural hair is not "appropriate" for a conservative workplace, nor will be they be able to address these biases.
We have all heard the quote "Create something you wish existed." I decided to create a career platform built by women of color for women of color. We need tools that help us prepare for our seat at the table. I was fortunate enough to have a seat, and I wanted to help other women who looked like me through education, community, and access. In my opinion, access is the missing ingredient to greatness, so I created the Memo.
I started my company as a solopreneur and then several months later, my good friend Lauren joined me, and we set out to be career superheroes for women of color. For almost a year, we prototyped our career product: free pop-up career boot camps. We had Salary Negotiation, How to Leverage Your Network, and Career Transitioning.
In the Summer of 2016, we launched our paid version of our career boot camps in NYC. Over the summer, 400 black and brown women paid to attend a career boot camp, and we recruited dynamic women of color to help us teach because they saw the need for The Memo too.
I have to admit: I wasn't prepared for the conversations that were to come. I felt confident with what we had built at that point. I knew friends who didn't have customers yet had still received millions of dollars in funding, so I figured we were in better shape than them. Of course, they weren't founders of color, but I didn't think that mattered much.
But I realized it did matter. A lot. As I met with angel investors, time and time again they would say to me, "I don't understand why you need a platform for women of color." I even had one man ask me, "What is a woman of color?" I had the stats, we had traction, and we had a customer base that was growing. I hit my breaking point when one investor said they would consider giving us money if we stopped focusing on women of color.
Let me give you some perspective. Ursula Burns was the first African American woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company. She left Xerox in 2016, and now there are none. So tell me again how you don't see a need for this platform? I went to ten investors, and each said the same thing.
I felt like I had that day in the sixth grade. I wasn't going to let money stop this show. I felt like Destiny's Child in those moments: "I'm not gon' give up, I'm not gon' stop, I'm gon' work harder." We kept building and continued to use our own money and invest in the next generation of Ursula Burnses.
Almost three years in, and we have a community of thousands of women of color across the country who participate in our weekly on- and offline career boot camps. I would be lying if I said all of those no's didn't gently crush my spirit from time to time, but as Audre Lorde wrote, "Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now." I didn't need their validation, because I saw women of color weekly utilizing our resources — so I knew what my why was.
Just recently, we received a seed investment, and it was from someone who believed in what we were building and I didn't have to convince them; it just reinforced the importance of diversity, inclusion, and access. In the words of Solange, "This sh*t is for us."
Minda Harts is the founder and CEO of the Memo, a career subscription platform for women of color, and the proud mom of a French bulldog named Boston. Follow her on Twitter @mindaharts. | | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | What The WWE Taught Me About Home | | | | By Hala Alyan | | |
I was always an odd child. I mean this objectively: I wore thick plastic glasses, I was prone to moody contemplation, and my favorite food was a bowl of soggy Rice Krispies. I was neither white nor Black nor Mexican, which meant, in the topography of my public elementary school in Oklahoma, that I was landless.
In its own way, this was poetically appropriate. My parents, Palestinian and Syrian immigrants, had fled Kuwait after Saddam's invasion, when I was four, ultimately settling down in a university town in the Midwest for a few years. We tried to fit in, but some things can't be helped. We changed our names, bought Lunchables for school trips, and strung a small tree for Christmas, but children can sniff out difference, and those years we mostly spent alone. Like many a loner before me, I sought shelter in my own imagination. I had multiple rituals, verging on the obsessive-compulsive — never let the volume be an odd number; say the names of those I loved four times before sleep; steal matchboxes from every restaurant we visited — little contracts with the universe to keep my brother safe, keep the funnel clouds from touching down, let the popular girls smile at me in the hallway.
Learning English coincided with learning to read. Since I hated sports and since sleepovers, in true immigrant fashion, weren't allowed ("You have a bed in your own house," my father liked to helpfully point out), I had plenty of time to read, everything from the Babysitters Club books to Toni Morrison. When you're emotionally code-switching between Hala and Holly, brown and white, English and Arabic, it's easy to participate in your own self-erasure. Each identity was conditional; if I wasn't fully any one of these things, then I was, essentially, none of them. This left me free — to become Jay Berry Lee and Jessica Wakefield and Nick Carraway and Holden and Heidi and Sherlock.
Even for such a greedy reader, there were many words I didn't know then. Displacement. Refugee. Intergenerational trauma. Translocation. My parents lost everything during the Gulf War. Bank accounts, childhood homes, a city they'd built a life in. They started over in a new country. They worked as bank tellers and gas-station attendants. Like most immigrants, they became psychologically bilingual, acognitive dissonance emerging between a private Arab household and the outside world of strip malls, Republican lawn signs, and autumnal square dances. I was the archetypal good immigrant daughter: obedient, quiet, sly. I hated spring, well-known for tornado season, and spent my spare time watching the Weather Channel. I studied the clouds outside not for faces but for threats.
Whenever I think of those years, I picture a sleeping volcano — the mutiny is yet to come, an adolescence of sexuality and deceit and addiction — a mound of silent earth, but beneath it fiery, chattering veins of lava. This is where I waited for something to change. This is where I let myself want.
I don't remember the first time I watched professional wrestling. All I know is there is a seismic shift in my childhood memories, a bland, skittish before, and an after: brighter, gutsier, my weird little heart captured by the sport. It was visually beautiful — a feast of dazzling colors and strobe lights and glitter — Lisa Frank with attitude. I was mesmerized by the ornate championship belt, the ever-changing alliances, the accidental expletives that, even bleeped out, were exhilarating to a girl who once whispered fuck into her pillow at night and promptly recited Quran as penance. The wrestlers were superheroes of their own making, unafraid of thunderstorms or escalators or Mrs. Sibinski calling on them.
Every Monday evening, I sat in front of the television with my brother, rapt as a churchgoer. The constructed reality of professional wrestling never bothered me. Anna Karenina wasn't real. Sweet Valley High wasn't real. Childhood is one big exercise in suspending disbelief, and I did so happily, howling when the wrestlers flew through the air with their impossible bodies, weeping when my heroes got smacked with a metal chair to the head. I didn't believe in Superman or Santa Claus, but I believed in Shawn Michaels. I believed in the audacious story lines, the ripped men and Amazonian women, and, more than anything, the sense of stability. In a world that had revealed itself to be chaotic and fickle, having something I could count on was enormously curing. My favorite wrestler won a championship in a last-minute dropkick, a stroke of luck that left me pumping my fists in the air, dancing around the living room to his customary music. Most of the time, I was a lonely, unpopular child who ate labneh and honey sandwiches for lunch. But for those minutes, I was as invincible as Michaels. My parents couldn't trust land. I couldn't trust sky. But I could trust this.
For wrestling to work, everyone must play their parts. There is no indecision, none of the messiness of life. There is no room for contradiction. The good guys are handsome and fretful, and people cheer for them. The bad guys are loud and smirky, and people boo them. Even when you love the bad guys — e.g., the Undertaker—you boo. That's your part. The bad guys aren't invested in changing the crowd's opinion. They don't care. Yes, there's colonialist, racist, Eurocentric undertones: The Iron Sheik with his absurd signature "camel clutch" move, the Latino wrestlers with cartoonish outfits and accents, entire plotlines centered on patriotism. But even as a child, I think I understood the irreverence of these caricatures, how by forcing the audience to witness their own devotion — or antagonism — toward certain archetypes, there was something slyly subversive about the entire enterprise.
I liked the troublemakers. I was a straight-A kid who sometimes stammered in class because I couldn't mentally translate a word from Arabic to English fast enough. Even well into adolescence, I rebelled silently, fought my battles passive-aggressively and offscreen, which made their riotousness all the more cathartic to me. I loved Degeneration X, loved the beer-swilling Triple H and Road Dogg. Theirs was a straightforward, thrilling mischief. They became godlike to me. I bought their action figures, but something strange happened when I tried to play with them — it got messy again. I didn't know how to keep it simple. I had them fallin love with each other; I gave them fathers, mistresses, intricate backstories. After a while, I stopped playing with them.
For every female wrestler who was rescued by a Steve Austin, there were two who saved themselves. Their bodies were as essential as the men's, and the women were unembarrassed by their sexuality. My favorite was Chyna. She oozed black leather. Every man she loved, I obediently loved as well, though it took me years to figure out that I was just in love with her. My love affair with professional wrestling ended abruptly, unceremoniously, after my family moved back to the Middle East, thanks to a combination of bad cable and conflicting time zones. I slowly forgot about the wrestlers. But I continued to mimic Chyna in subtle, unconscious ways growing up — cutting bangs, adopting stoniness, seeking group after group of men I could be the sidekick to. Now I wish she'd been more of a main character. When I found out she died, I was almost 30, and I walked an hour over the Williamsburg Bridge to stand by the pier and cry like a baby.
Sometimes, I Google my old gods. There's a lot I've had to put together as an adult: how most moves and "throws" require wrestlers to carry each other, how there truly is abrilliance to such oversimplified portrayals of good and evil, the death wish inside all of us that hungers for Jungian archetypes of disruption and nihilism. What such hunger teaches us about ourselves. As a child, when I discovered that the matches — despite the identical, Crayola-bright wrestling rings and elaborate light displays — were actually taking place in different cities every week, reconstructed Monday after Monday, I was floored. At nine, I had already lived in four countries, and this revelation changed me: here was proof that one could make a home on different shores, without having to stay still.
Hala Alyan is a clinical psychologist and the author of the novel Salt Houses. | | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | | | | | | | | | | How To Look After Your Face at the End of the World | | | | By Mikaella Clements | | | |
We arrived at Shelly Beach coming up on 24 hours without sleep. Earlier, it had been pouring with rain. We'd driven past statues of moas — giant, flightless birds native to New Zealand and now extinct — and in our sleep-deprived fever had been convinced they were moving. But at Shelly Beach, the rain tidied itself away, and we were left with gray skies and a sea that looked like a mirror, silver and still. My father and brother wrestled with the motor-home beds, coaxing them out of walls. My sister sat smoking on the jetty. My mother, youngest sister, and I claimed the first bed, lying there under cool sheets, half-dazed with exhaustion and heads still rattling along until Mum got up again to make us Bloody Marys.
My sister started talking, a rambling half-thought.
"Please don't talk. If anyone talks, I'm going to kill you," I said.
"I hate you all," my mum said pleasantly.
We rolled giggling back into our beds, and I drifted off into blurry, red-warm sleep. When I got up, my skin felt stretched out and rough. I put Aesop's Hydrating Masque, a blue chamomile in a thick goop, all over my cheeks, watching the color seep back into my face. Outside, everything was dark and still, and my family were curled all about, murmuring in their sleep.
At the end of August, I went home to Australia for the first time in two years. Visas, bureaucracy, and money had conspired against me, and I'd been away from my family for much longer than planned. My family are, and always have been, obsessed with one another. We're in near-constant communication, even when I moved to Germany and one of my younger sisters moved up to work in Kakadu, a national park in Australia's Northern Territory. We trade inside jokes like hands of cards, fight, make up, gossip about one another to strangers as though we're talking about celebrities. It still occasionally surprises me that other people don't talk about their families like this, with a heady mix of frustration and myth. When my sister and I were due to visit home at the same time, we decided it would be a good idea to go on a family holiday, our first in five years. All six of us (I know) living for three weeks in a self-contained motor home (I know), traveling around New Zealand and doing our best not to kill one another. It seemed like a perfect plan.
My wife lay on our bed while I packed. "Do you guys know what you're going to do?" she asked. And then: "Do you really need three toiletry bags?"
"I think we're going to figure it out," I said, carefully laying out my products in heavy jars and cracked tubes. Basics in one bag: Mario Badescu's cleansers and toners, which saved my skin; a La Roche Posay moisturizer; Biore Sarasara sunscreen, whose pleasant pearly sheen I will swear by forever; the Ordinary's lactic-acid and niacinamide serums; a series of tried and true masks. Another bag held the fancy products I use when I'm feeling every bit as broke and useless as a 25-year-old can be, products that came to me via gift voucher or hand-me-down or an invoice, carefully saved. A Chanel cleanser, a serum from Pai, Armani foundation too pale for the friend who had purchased it. A third bag for makeup. A fourth that I produced, while my wife laughed, to take on planes: Glossier's priming moisturizer and perfecting skin tint, a Kiehl's travel-size Blue Herbal cleanser, Mario Badescu's rosewater spray.
They were like lucky charms. My wife, with her clear skin and perfect brows and eyelashes so long it always looks like she's wearing mascara even though she never does, doesn't understand them. But she leaned over and tapped each of the bags, grinning up at me, like she was casting a spell.
I'm skeptical about skin care as magic. It's easy to buy wholly into the skin-care-as-self-care movement, forgetting the vast oppressive structures the beauty industry is built on, forgetting the industry's racism and misogyny, forgetting the struggle of income and accessibility. I don't think my cluttered collection of moisturizers and exfoliators is anything wholly kind or tender, even when I try to use it kindly and tenderly.
All the same, skin care taught me to like my face, or at least be interested by it, when nothing else had. And though I live a strange and lucky life, my friends and family sometimes feel scattered, so that I have to pick sides without wanting to — stay with my wife in Germany or my family in Australia. The sacks of serums I can take with me, like some mad skin-care Santa, and build quiet homes through habit and domestic ritual wherever I am: in Melbourne, in Berlin, in New Zealand, in the air.
New Zealand landscapes are shocking, so beautiful, that they unsettle. You can't get used to them. My dad, incredulous, said, "Every time you get up, you want to take another photo." My mum reached out to run her hands over tree trunks, in awe of them; a blend of arctic and tropical, mangrove-esque shrubs with icy lime growths of lichen. I sat in the navigator's seat, my bubble pouch of charms thrown up on the dashboard with my feet. Every few hours, I'd pass back Lucas Pawpaw Ointment for any chapped lips or cuticles.
We stayed at a different campsite every night, tracking south for 3,000 kilometers. I woke up each morning frozen, trying to work out where I was, my sister's feet in my face and the windows fogged up with the last of New Zealand's winter. Eventually the only way to orientate myself was to blearily shove my feet in my brother's Ugg boots, trek to the latest in a series of campground toilets, and wash my face.
I set my wash bag up in wooden cabins built in the '70s, still flaunting the orange curtains to prove it, at huge rows of sinks that looked like they were made for summer camp. At night I followed old, beloved routines, the same ones that I do at five in the morning, stumbling home from a raucous night out in Berlin, the ones I can do in my sleep. With my eyes closed, rinsing my face, my wife could have been in the next room. In the bathroom, my sister and I stood at the sink together, mutely passing toothpaste and cleansers back and forth. The bathrooms with paper towels were the best: something to pat your face dry with.
My skin hesitated, then bloomed in the cool beginnings of New Zealand's spring. One week in, I left my stronger exfoliators — the lactic acid, the Paula's Choice 2 percent BHA liquid — buried at the bottom of my bag. I didn't have to fight off the grime of the city at the end of every night; instead, I relied on my sunscreen and cleansers, going to bed fresh, waking up each morning to add a layer of protection. I stopped wearing makeup, for the most part, though I used Glossier's Priming Moisturizer as religiously as ever. Nothing else, not even tap water stolen from a glacier, can soothe the redness of my skin.
In Punakaiki, my siblings and I pelted over rocks and threw ourselves into the Tasman Sea, my sisters like washed-up sprites, my brother yelping after waves. We sat on the sand with foam gathering around our waists and the high Jurassic cliff faces above us. Later, I patted in Kiehl's Daily Reviving Oil, sunflower yellow with the comforting smells of ginger and turmeric, which billowed over the deep cleanse of the sea and countered the drying tendency salt has on my face. The next morning, my sister stared at herself in the mirror, outraged at the two pimples that had blossomed overnight. Nelsons Acne Gel is one of the few homeopathic treatments I trust; it was recently unexpectedly and tragically discontinued. I handed my last tube over, wordless and bitter.
We stopped for two nights in a holiday park at the base of Franz Josef Glacier. We were too tired to drive anymore, too tired even to embark on another hike. We spent a day sleeping and ducking into a supermarket for fresh supplies. Overhanging the park was the sheer slope of the mountains, palm trees framed against a rain forest, snowy peaks, and then a block of ice. "It looks fake," Mum said, and took another photo.
My sister and I sat silently in the motor home wearing Korean sheet masks — Pure Essence Avocado, which set my cheeks soft, and Acai Berry for her, chosen for its bright package. I wrote an essay for university about Saint Constance. My sister hummed to herself and fell asleep. Every now and then, we accidentally frightened each other with our paper-clad faces.
The next morning, the six of us hiked around Franz Josef Glacier. There were great slabs of rock with edges so sharp and surfaces so flat that Mum said it was as though a bulldozer had crashed through them. They gave way to a milky river, the water on the blue side of gray-white, like cold eggshell. I wanted to wash my face in it; I wondered what its pH balance was. We wound our way up to the glacier at the head of the valley. It was twenty square kilometers at the top and contained, in any case, hues of blue, squares and thin sly rectangles of light. My family watched for a little while, our skin smooth and shining in the beam of the glacier, and then we walked back home.
Mikaella Clements is an Australian writer who lives in Berlin. Find her online at mikaellaclements.com. | | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | | | | | | | | | | The Boarding House of My Dreams | | | | By Grace Linden | | |
In 2015, I lodged for one year in a brown brick terrace house on Dorset Square. I write "lodged" and not "rented," or "lived," even, because "lodged" is what it is when you pay for a room in a furnished house and live with your somewhat older landlady. Life in London is expensive, so finding affordable housing anywhere, and especially in Central London, is akin to winning the lottery; there's about the same chance of England finishing first in Eurovision or Trump peacefully resigning. MP, my landlady, is an admirable curator and a friend of a friend's former boss. I'm the third of three girls to quit New York and relocate to London to study art history in this house for art historians.
The flat appealed for what then seemed to be its distinctly English charms: lemon-yellow upholstery, a green Roberts radio, and stacks of teacups. The living room had floor-to-ceiling French doors that opened onto a shallow balcony. When London hit record-high temperatures that July, I'd climb through the windows with an £8 bottle of wine and stretch out. More elegant than a fire escape, the balcony made that time in London feel exactly like summers in New York and not at all the same.
There were always people in and out of Dorset Square. I thought of it like a modern salon in the style of Gertrude Stein or Florine Stettheimer — my own "golden age." Curators, academics, dancers, they all came to wine and dine. MP was a constant whir with a social life that would make anyone jealous. She's straightforward in the English way that I've never quite managed, brusque but always charismatic and kind. Sometimes, MP would have visitors to stay, and I'd give up my cozy room for a night or two. MP would bring down an air mattress, blow it up in the middle of the living room, and dress the bed in crisp monogrammed sheets. She'd say, "Here are sleeping quarters fit for a Russian princess fleeing the Bolsheviks."
Alongside MP, I also shared the house with ZO and ZM, two former Hungarian ballerinas, one of whom had been MP's Pilates instructor. We often sat around the kitchen chatting. (What is it that makes the kitchen the true center of a home?) In the space before Brexit and Trump, we'd debate the changing European order and whatever idiotic statement Nigel Farage had made that week. People, especially Americans, like to tell me that my life in London isn't different from what it was in the United States, and the shared language breeds a false set of assumptions. The truth is that my friends at home look and sound a lot like me, variations on a similar theme, and the proximity of continental Europe means that London cultivates a different sort of cosmopolitanism. ZM and ZO had grown up behind the Iron Curtain and MP in postwar Britain; their childhoods could not have been more different from my California upbringing. Time and geography meant that our lives twisted in unimaginable ways, and yet, here we were, living together. Our home represented four nationalities and five languages and spanned decades.
Boarding houses more formalized than my own were once essential to the infrastructure of American cities. They offered, for pretty cheap rent, an equalizing space for both men and women. As Walt Whitman wrote: "Married men and single men, old women and pretty girls; milliners and masons; cobblers, colonels, and counter jumpers; tailors and teachers; lieutenants, loafers, ladies, lackbrains, and lawyers; printers and parsons — 'black spirits and white, blue spirits and gay'—all 'go out to board."
After rejecting Laurie's marriage proposal, Jo March, the plucky heroine of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, moves to New York, and the boardinghouse becomes her entrée into an exciting and dynamic new world. "I shall see and hear new things, get new ideas," she tells her mother after laying out her plan. That chapter is, in all honesty, dull (or maybe Jo just kept a dull diary) but for the first time, she has adventures all her own and even meets Fritz Bhaer, her future husband. I carry Little Women to all the places I live, so despite being of another time and in a different city, I was following in her wake, though I hoped it would be altogether more wild and irregular.
We've come to think of boardinghouses as quaint in the mold of Jo's adventures in the big city, but the actual history is less charming. If homemaking in the nineteenth century was overly romanticized, then boardinghouses, where paid labor and domestic tasks commingled, were hotbeds for vice. The flirtatious housewife, the gambling tenants, the perpetually drunk and perpetually unemployed husband, the sex-crazed daughter — these were widely disseminated caricatures that became a part of American folklore. Historian Wendy Gamber goes further, writing, "Sometimes in reality, most often symbolically, boardinghouses easily dissolved into brothels. Like brothels, they sold women's services, bringing housewifery into the marketplace." These views cemented the belief that boardinghouses traffic immorality and that home and work should be distinct from one another.
While this may sound harmless, recent elections are a reminder that fearmongering shapes public opinion, and after more than 50 years of this rhetoric, it's no surprise that boardinghouses faded from the urban map. But economic and infrastructure developments also contributed to their demise. Improvements in public transportation at the start of the twentieth century encouraged people to move to the suburbs and commute for work. Growing affluence meant more and more people were able to live on their own. Ultimately, the home (the single-family ideal) won out.
Despite the obviously swollen rents in London (and New York and San Francisco, just to name a few), my living situation always inspired questions. "Is it, like, really your home?"; "Don't you want to live with friends?"; and, most telling, "Why does she have lodgers anyway?" The obvious truth is I liked living there, and it was certainly nicer than anything else in my budget. I liked the room with a big window and the books and the air of an old-fashioned intellectualism. The real answer, of course, is more complicated, not just in financial terms. Unlike rooming with friends or actual family, we demanded nothing of one another. We came and went as we pleased and all had very different schedules. And yet, we were a family nonetheless. Unplanned and unprovoked, MP offered me guidance both personal and professional, about having a career and a relationship or who to contact about a certain painting, a perspective that friends my own age could never have provided. The Hungarians treated me like a little sister, buying me cake on my birthday and poking fun at my dinners. While these people couldn't replace my actual flesh and blood, we were an imitation family, and we took care of our own.
Sometimes I wonder if I will ever live alone. Adulthood (at least in the movies) always seems to mean your own home with a stocked refrigerator and an endless supply of toilet paper. But intentional communities appear almost novel again: formalized co-ops, group parenting, and even Common, a start-up investing in co-living. (Lizzie Widdicombe's deep dive into co-living for The New Yorkerdetails Common's merge of high-tech and hippie ideals.) And if the news reports are correct, I can expect to make way less money than my parents (not just because of my art-history degrees) so I imagine roommates of some form will remain a constant.
Yet there's something about lodging that feels fundamentally different from other arrangements. I didn't choose Dorset Square to find a community. Like Jo, like the Hungarians, like countless others, I came to a big city for an opportunity. Together, we all are seeking something professional and not personal. Lodging allowed me to find my footing in a city far from my own; it's a launch pad into the unknown. I may have given up the freedom to choose a couch and the opportunity to walk around naked, but I had access to people whose perspectives and experiences were indispensable and who cared enough to help me move my life forward.
I left Dorset Square to live with my boyfriend, but shortly thereafter his job moved him back to California; it was a brief cohabitation. I've calculated that since leaving for college, I've had fifteen addresses in less than ten years, and I now have added number sixteen. Thanks to MP, I've landed in another art historian's home, though this time it's just me and her. I'm excited: once again, I will be living behind a large door, in a house filled with books, paying absurdly low rent.
Grace Linden is a PhD candidate at the University of York. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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