Don't Call Me Princess

by Peggy Orenstein

At last I stood on my runners, one foot planted on the main brake. Markku took off first, followed by Margarete and one of the Einstein brothers. I was next. Mari, standing a short distance from me, called out one last piece of advice in that laconic Finnish intonation: “Hold on with both hands!”

  For years I had thought of myself as a Weeble, one of those roly-poly children’s toys that “wobble but they don’t fall down.” I had, after all, survived breast cancer in my thirties, an age when it tends to be especially deadly; after three miscarriages and six years of infertility, I got pregnant in my forties with my daughter. There were other crises, too, of the heart and the head as well as the body—how could there not be after five decades of living?—but they didn’t define me. I’d always popped up fine. Yet lately, incrementally, I had begun to feel defective, emotionally diminished rather than strengthened by trauma, in danger of becoming the sum of my pain. Had that happened after this latest bout of cancer or before? I couldn’t say. But I felt cleaved, a word that also means its opposite: cleaved to this body, whether I liked it or not, and from it by its many betrayals. I wanted to bounce back, but this time I just couldn’t.

  My dogs lunged forward. The sled tipped left, listed right; I felt myself start to tumble. Then I stomped on the pan brake with one foot, and magically the team slowed. My whole body thrummed, but I stayed on the sled. The barking had stopped the second the dogs took off. Now it was quiet, the only sounds their rhythmic panting, the creak of the wooden sled, the scrape and skitter of the pan brake along the powder. I relaxed my death grip on the handlebar and looked around: at spruce trees whose needles were individually etched in crystals of ice, at birches laden so heavily with snow that they’d bent into arches over the trail. I’d heard that Eskimos have fifty words for snow and that Finns have nearly as many. I understood why. We sledded through crystallized snow and powder snow, compacted layers, and snow as granular as salt.

  I zoomed over moguls, catching air and momentarily taking flight. In truth, we averaged about seven miles an hour and covered up to nineteen miles a day, but when you’re balanced on two thin wooden planks, trust me, that is blazing. One of my dogs, Harald, lifted his leg to pee whenever I rode the brake or neglected to help on hills by pushing with one foot. Maybe it was my imagination, but his gesture felt personal.

  Too soon we pulled into our camp for the week: a cabin on a snow-covered lake with an outhouse, a wood-burning sauna, and a kota—a traditional hexagonal cottage with a conical roof and a central fire pit—in which we’d eat our meals. Although we’d been out in the cold for hours, pausing only for a lunch of sausages roasted over an open fire, we now tended to the dogs’ comfort before our own. I stroked shoulders and cradled paws, cuddled Bambi, gave Ninni a belly rub. I chained each one to a little straw-filled house where they built their nightly nest. Mari, meanwhile, pulled around a sled weighed down with kibble and a barrel of broth studded with animal fat and parts I preferred not to contemplate.

  Nico spied a volunteer staffer heading toward the sauna with an ice pick. There was a hole in the ice of a stream there, just wide enough for the bucket. The staffer cut it open twice a day to haul water for washing dishes and sluicing ourselves in the sauna (the nearest we’d get to bathing). Nico offered to take over, plotting to enlarge the hole so he could fit through it. The ice was nearly two feet thick. Michaela laughed at him. The rest of us did, too. Even Nico laughed. But he kept chipping away. “Now we have soup,” Mari said when the dogs were settled, as if this were normal, as if the whole world took a soup break at around five o’clock. Maybe they should: it turns out there is nothing so comforting or convivial. On successive days we warmed to steamy bowls of cream of mushroom, potato-leek, tomato, vegetable, and ginger-carrot accompanied by tea, bread, white Finnish cheese, and a little cake. We laughed and shared stories of the trail, holding our hands and stocking feet out to the fire. When Mari said it was sauna time, I hesitated. Finnish women used to give birth in saunas. There is an entire wing devoted to saunas in the country’s Parliament House. And an estimated two million private homes in a country of about five million people have them. There is even a sauna about four thousand six hundred feet below sea level, in a Finnish metal mine. Taking a sauna was virtually obligatory for a visitor, but this would be the first time since my surgery that I’d disrobe in front of anyone but my husband and my daughter.

  Dressed, I looked fine—better than fine: my new breast passed for natural, and my stomach was flatter than it had been since puberty. I may have felt lousy about myself, but I looked great. Beneath my clothes, however, a jagged purple scar slashed from hip to hip. My reconstructed belly button was ringed by scars, and another scar cupped the underside of my breast. They were the price of staying alive, and I was grateful for them, but I didn’t want to discuss them. Not even with other women. Still, I couldn’t skip such an integral part of the experience. Besides, I was freezing. On our way to the sauna building, I told Michaela and Margarete as briefly and casually as I could, precluding any pity. They were sympathetic, but that wasn’t the point: I was here to transcend the identity of illness, not confess it.

  Here is what you are supposed to do in a Finnish sauna: sit on a wooden bench until the sweat cascades off you, until you are flushed and slimy and so hot that you can’t bear it any longer. So hot that you will do this mad thing: you will run outside, stark naked, and fling yourself into the snow. It is not something I imagined I would ever do—could ever do—yet with the others urging me on, I dashed outside, screaming, and flung myself face-first into a snowdrift. It was cold. Burning cold. And the snow was the texture of sandpaper. I stood up, turning toward the sauna, but Margarete stopped me. “Now on the back!” she said. So I threw myself backward, tush first. Then, laughing and still whooping, living nowhere but in that moment, I returned to the heat.

  That night I dreamed my dogs were pulling my sled without harnesses—no ropes, no clips. We simply floated together, a unit, through the snowy nights and days. There was no cold. There was no heat. There was just being.

  By morning the cup of water I’d left on the windowsill for toothbrushing had frozen solid. So had my toothpaste. So had my contact lenses. My camera would also freeze, as would the ink in my pens. I shimmied into an extra layer of long underwear inside my sleeping bag, then climbed out to check the thermometer; it was nine degrees in the cabin and twenty-seven below outside. And although I had been trying to drink as little as possible, I had to pee. I steeled myself for the task by piling on pants, a jacket, a hat, mittens, socks, and boots. The outhouse was a short jaunt down a snowy path: a deceptively quaint, snow-covered log structure with diamond cutouts in the door and back wall for ventilation. A Styrofoam seat covered a wooden hole—it wasn’t cold to the touch, exactly, but neither was it warm, and an Arctic breeze whooshed up from below. On my way back to the cabin, I passed Margarete, who waved cheerfully. She was wearing an undershirt and leggings—no jacket, nothing on her head or hands. I glanced down: her feet were bare, in flip-flops.

  That second day, my sled shot out from under me; I hung suspended in midair, flailing like a cartoon character, then was dumped headfirst into the snow. The dogs kept going, until Markku grabbed them. Everyone waited while, in the musher’s equivalent of the walk of shame, I struggled through the snow to fetch them back. I’d go down three times before realizing that mushing was in the legs: the trick was to go with the motion, not fight it—to dance with your dogs. We burst onto a snow-covered lake, a glittering expanse under a crystalline sky. It was spectacular, that emptiness, a vista of frozen potential. I took a deep breath. Northern Finland has some of the cleanest air in Europe; every inhale felt like a sip of springwater, delicious and pure. I’d assumed that we’d sled the same terrain every day and that while lovely, it would get a little dull. Now we circled upward to the top of a fell—a small Finnish mountain—stopping at the edge of the tree line. Moisture in the air had condensed on the branches in layers, forming wild, Seussian phantasms: a child f
ishing, a queen in a white fur cape, flying dragons, sentinels. I would say it felt like another planet, but it didn’t, not at all. It felt, at last, as if we were in the Arctic.

  My nostalgia for Rudolph aside, I’d been excited about trying reindeer meat, common in the Finnish diet, but it proved less succulent than I’d imagined. It’s a little chewy, like a lesser cut of beef, but Mari cooked it into a tasty stew. For dessert there were sour lingonberries she had picked and frozen over the summer, topped with yogurt and caramel sauce. Afterward, we duly donned our Arctic gear and trudged into the moonless night, walking single file along the trail (to avoid sinking into the snow) until we reached the lake. A faint green stripe fanned across the horizon, then changed direction and shot straight up. The northern lights. The Einstein brothers began to natter on about the science—something about collisions of gaseous particles—but I turned away. I preferred the Finnish explanation: the lights are sparks swept from the snow by the tail of a magical fox as it runs across the fells. I gazed up at the firmament, at stars brighter than any I might ever see again. There were Orion, the Big and Little Dippers. There were the Pleiades and Cassiopeia. There was the bright North Star, glittering like an icy gem, leading lost travelers home.

  We mushed uphill all the next morning. On the steepest slopes I jogged behind my sled, pushing until the crest, then hopping back on before the dogs could pull off without me. I sweated through my many layers, that fresh Finnish air now searing my lungs. The arm on my mastectomy side ached from the dogs’ yanking. Harald lifted his leg. A lot. I can’t do this, I thought. It was too soon. I was too weak. I would have to quit. I focused on Margarete, straight and sinewy, two teams ahead of me. Hanging on to the pretense of youth mattered to her not at all. Her hair was white, clipped short for ease, not style; her face was lined; her teeth were yellowed. Yet she was tougher than the rest of us: the first one up every morning, the last one inside at night. Her beauty ran deep, a product of spirit, not cosmetics. And if she could do this, dang it, I could, too.

  Nico’s ice bath was ready on our last afternoon at camp. Michaela snapped pictures as he streaked to the hole. Somehow he persuaded the other men, one by one, to follow his lead. They returned to the cabin pink and swaggering, urging us ladies to give it a try. “Anyone can roll in snow,” Nico announced. “This is special.” It was twenty-two degrees below zero outside, but I am a sucker for a dare. So I sat in the sauna until I thought my eyeballs would blister. Then, before rationality could set in, I sprinted, naked and steaming, to the hole’s icy ledge, slipping and sliding my way in. The water was surprisingly gentle on the skin, less scratchy than snow. I dunked to my armpits, grinning crazily, desperate to get out, loving that I was in. Back in the sauna, I felt as shining and phosphorescent as the aurora itself. For months my body’s limits had defined me, but not anymore. It wasn’t that I felt invulnerable—those days are gone. But I was resilient. And in the end, isn’t that better?

  Part 3

  Not Your Mama’s Motherhood

  The Perfect Mother Trap

  During the “Mommy Wars” of the early 2000s, women who stayed home with children were pitted in the media against mothers who worked for pay and neither side emerged a winner. Womens’ insecurites were ripe for exploitation: after all, in what I would come to call a “half-changed world,” others’ choices can feel like a rebuke. We may be headed for another round of conflict: according to a survey that has monitored attitudes of high school seniors over the past forty years, the percentage of both sexes who believe that the best family arrangement is one with a male breadwinner and a female homemaker has risen steadily since the mid-1990s, growing fastest among boys. And while young women’s confidence that employed women are as good mothers as those who stay home has gradually risen, young men’s has dropped to the point where those aged 18 to 25 have become more traditional on the subject than their elders.

  I was not yet a mother myself when I wrote this piece, which ran in July 2000, nor was I sure I ever wanted to become one. It was adapted from Flux, my second book, which I began, in part, as an attempt to make that decision, sort through my own ambivalence and fears about motherhood.

  On a lush summer day in suburban New Jersey, Carrie Pollack,* thirty-eight, strides through a shopping mall toward the red-hot center of what she calls the parallel universe of stay-at-home moms. She pulls up short in front of a playground designed to look like a lily pond: dozens of children leap in gleeful chaos, plunging from plastic toadstools, squirming through hollow logs, and rolling around the blue-mat “water,” while the adults supervise from carpeted steps. “Well, ladies and jelly beans,” Carrie says, beaming at four-year-old Julia and eighteen-month-old Sam, “what do you think?”

  Carrie is just shy of five feet tall, dressed in blue jeans, a T-shirt, and sandals. Her dark hair is pulled back into a ponytail; her large brown eyes, under straight-cut bangs, are slightly asymmetrical, giving her a friendly, quizzical look. It’s easy to see why, back when she was a district attorney prosecuting child abuse cases—before Julia and Sam were born—she could win the trust of even her most traumatized clients.

  She takes a seat as the children skitter stockingfooted into the fray. Around us, the stairs are filled with women. It may be 1997 in the real world, but here in the parallel universe, it looks more like the 1950s. There is a smattering of grandmothers and nannies, but mostly these are full-time moms. I see exactly two fathers during our visit here, and only one is without his wife. As that man walks by, Sam stops what he’s doing and stares, eyes wide, until the man is out of sight. Sam always stares at men, Carrie explains: “He’s not used to seeing fathers during the day.”

  Over the last four years, I have interviewed more than two hundred women for my book Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World. The women I talked to were married and single, with and without children, working and staying home. Most, but not all, were college graduates; all were currently in the broad swath considered middle-class, although many were raised in blue-collar homes or in poverty. They ranged in age from their mid-twenties to their mid-forties, which meant that by the time they became adults, sexual norms, marital patterns, relationships with family, and women’s career expectations—the warp and woof of what it means to be an American female—had undergone a radical transformation.

  I was interested in how, as teenagers, they had imagined their lives would unfold; how their aspirations had changed over time; what they expected from marriage and motherhood; what they’d learned about managing conflicting demands and choices. Ultimately, I hoped these conversations would yield a deeper understanding of the forces that shape our lives—as well as help break down some of the barriers that keep women from talking to one another.

  By their mid-thirties, many of the mothers I spoke with, including Carrie Pollack, seemed surprised by where they had ended up, describing a kind of whiplash turnaround from their younger, single selves. Back then, they’d imagined that they would divide housework and child care equally with their future husbands. Somehow, though, that’s not what happened. Whether or not they worked outside the home, the vast majority of women had made concessions to parenthood in a way that men, for the most part, still do not. That’s why words like “balance,” “trade-off,” and “work-family conflict” have become as feminine as pink tulle.

  Women complained to me that their husbands didn’t pull their domestic weight, but time after time, I heard them let men off the hook. A thirty-eight-year-old technical writer I interviewed in San Francisco was typical: “You know,” she mused after running down a litany of frustrations, “my husband is really involved compared with his own father.”

  I pushed, pointing out that this sets the bar too low. Shouldn’t we be comparing men’s involvement with that of their wives instead? “Well,” said another mom, “you can’t really expect that.” I tried putting it another way: “It seems to me that women, whatever their arrangements, feel like lesser mothers than those of the
previous generation. Meanwhile, men, even with minimal participation at home, feel like better fathers.”

  “You’re right,” the first woman acknowledged, “because most of the men we know are better fathers. But I don’t know any woman who doesn’t struggle.”

  Carrie Pollack was a little different, and that’s what had drawn me to her. More than almost anyone I met, she and her husband, Brian,* thirty-six, were in a position to make good on the promise of equal parenting. He was one of the rare men in America to take a six-month unpaid paternity leave when his daughter was born. Meanwhile, Carrie loved her job prosecuting child molesters and had felt strongly about her economic independence. She even earned more than her husband did. Even so, here she was, sitting by the plastic lily pond while her husband, a mid-level lawyer in the federal government, was off at work. What, I wondered, had led someone who valued equality so fiercely to make such a traditional choice?

  The answers, I discovered, revealed a great deal, not just about Carrie and Brian but about modern women’s and men’s deepest expectations about parenthood and the real range of choices we allow ourselves to consider. They also say something about what needs to change psychologically as much as culturally for men to do more in the home and for women to let them.

  A few hours after we return home from the mall, Brian Pollack comes through the door and yells a greeting. He’s a bearish man, with an unruly mop of red hair and a warm, patient expression. He sweeps his daughter off her feet for a hug, and she dissolves in giggles. “It has surprised me that our love has grown,” Carrie confides. “I never thought that I could love him more than the day we married. But I’m just crazy about him. And I think part of that is the joy of seeing him with our kids.”