Rebels in White Gloves

by Miriam Horn

  After discussions with the Marshallese health ministry and community leaders on how they might help islanders scattered across a million square miles of ocean, Lonny and David created the Marimed Foundation and raised $4 million to build a tall ship, a three-masted topsail schooner, with a shipboard laboratory and X-ray facilities, that could sail through the Outer Islands full-time to train and support local public health workers. The Marshallese children christened the majestic vessel with her big-bellied sails the Tole Mour—“Gift of Health and Life.” In the four years it took to build the ship, Lonny and her team flew to many of the islands, most of which were without electricity or clean water. They sterilized instruments in water heated over a coconut-husk fire, and Lonny did pelvic exams with a flashlight in her mouth—on women who were stretched across school desks with their feet in buckets. When the time came for training, Lonny herself stretched across desks and let island women do pelvics on her, again and again. To treat prostitutes infected with syphilis, who were too ashamed to come for treatment, Lonny would go to the discotheques, take the women into the ladies’ room, and give them shots.

  Lonny’s kids often helped—weighing babies, assisting with immunization—all the time living barefoot and learning the language and ways of the Marshallese. Lonny also learned, developing great respect for traditional healers. “If someone was sick, they would ask, ‘Did he steal his neighbor’s fish? Was there a curse put on him?’ I could give the guy ampicillin, but he wouldn’t get better until he made amends. I came to understand that you don’t come in as the great white fixer but as the guest of the healer, to learn: What are the poultices that draw out infection? What are the uses of taro and breadfruit? I learned that you have to be a listener, notice patients’ body language, what’s in their eyes. The body tells a story, which I would try to frame for them in a way that matched their reality. I would tell them, ‘If the lungs sound like water crashing on a reef, that’s the sound of pneumonia.’ ”

  By the time the Higginses launched the Tole Mour, dispensaries were in place and locals had been trained on most of the islands. In another few years, the system was so self-sufficient that Lonny and the Tole Mour were not needed at all. In anticipation of that time, Lonny and David had begun sailing between the Marshall Islands with troubled adolescents. Though the kids’ grandfathers had been masters of the sea, those seafaring skills had been mostly lost to younger generations. “By sailing on the Tole Mour, the kids reconnected with those traditions and returned home heroes, with a great sense of honor,” Lonny says.

  That experiment became the basis of the Marimed Foundation’s ongoing program in Hawaii for adjudicated youth. As an alternative to incarceration, teens who have been convicted of crimes, often violent ones, can spend six months aboard the Tole Mour. They sail the Pacific and sometimes through the Panama Canal, learning the complex skills needed to take such a ship through fierce storms and endless calms. They stand night watch, taking full responsibility for the ship’s safety, and sleep entrusting the same to their shipmates. “Structure and duty are easier to accept when imposed by nature,” says David. “The sea becomes a metaphor for the kids’ struggle to weave their way through chaos and powerlessness. The journey is a rite of passage into adult life. Most of these kids were abandoned or abused. They’d been handcuffed and chained, but until they met our staff, a lot of them hadn’t been held much in human arms. Half are parents themselves, but for many it was the first time they felt they belonged to something, that they had a family.” Though a single act of violence lands a kid immediately in jail, all make dire mistakes, again and again. “You just keep loving them through it,” David says.

  Recently, Lonny and David have brought the ship closer to home, sailing mostly among the Hawaiian islands, sometimes bringing a kid’s family along for a day sail. Again, Lonny’s holistic principles are at work: “You need to work with the family system; you can’t just change the child.” To prevent recidivism, Lonny and David also created Kailana, a residential center on Oahu for the kids returning from their sea journey and for other kids not able to live at home. At Kailana the teen residents learn to build their own little wooden nutshell prams and sail them in the turquoise bay. “They develop manual skills and build a sense of who they are,” says Lonny. “There’s a kind of therapy in physical labor.” The boats are launched with native rituals and ukulele songs under palm trees and cloud-draped mountains; punk boys with tattoos sing songs they wrote of returning to “my people’s past, a time of happiness.” Lonny is Kailana’s medical director. In a session for the girls on safe sex, she acts out the womb—her arms, fallopian tubes holding ovaries; her language blunt and slangy: “I haven’t found a penis yet that’s totally healthy.”

  In 1991, Lonny founded a women’s health center near their home on Oahu and returned to obstetrics, putting into practice the spiritual understanding of illness she learned from the Marshallese. “The body has cellular memory; emotional pain is somatized,” she says. “If a girl has painful periods, I ask, ‘What does it mean in your family to become a woman, to draw the attention of men?’ With fibrocystic breast disease, I consider the breast a symbol of nurturance. I still do D and Cs, of course, and Pap smears to rule out cancers. But I’ve found that hormone imbalances can be redressed by naturopaths, using things like creams made from yams. Sometimes I prescribe ayurvedics, Tai Chi, meditation, or acupuncture. You’d be surprised how much less medication you use.”

  Much of her practice is with teens: “I see fourteen-year-old pregnant girls with their cell phones and beepers and the hyped look of methamphetamine; I took enough speed to get through exams to recognize it. I tell them that if they’ll admit they’re using, I’ll put them in detox. If not, I’ll randomly screen their urine, and if they don’t stay off drugs, I won’t see them.”

  Lonny’s approach to delivering babies has deep echoes of the eco-feminism to which so many women in her Wellesley class subscribe. “I help my ladies deal with their fear of giving birth by telling them, ‘You are three women. You are the ancient woman, the Clan of the Cave Bear Woman, with the power of millions of years of success, a vessel superbly designed to carry on the species, with a purpose for every bone and muscle. You are also the modern woman, with all her intellectual preparation. And you are the infant who remembers your own birth.’ You’ll see a woman get claustrophobic and panicky during delivery, as if she were the passenger. I tell them you can rock that baby you were, tell it ‘you’re safe,’ and both babies will get the message. The cervix just opens. The Marshallese don’t push a baby out, they let it out; only at crowning do they begin to grunt. They’re matrilineal, and celebrate giving birth as a rite of womanhood. We’ve lost that reverence for who we are at each life stage. A woman never gets another chance to feel herself that real. Birthing is a primal rite of passage, to be revered and shared; my son was there for the birth of his sister.”

  Lonny also shares her classmates’ belief in a woman’s way of healing. With her patients, she is intimate, warm, and physical. “Men are excellent technicians, but a lot are prima donnas; there’s lots of emotional arrest. A woman brings a different kind of compassion. I’ve given birth; I can relate to the stresses of motherhood and menopause. It’s not unfeminine to share tears. I have an easier time holding a patient than a male doctor would. And a woman is more comfortable educating and sharing responsibility with the patient; she hasn’t such a need to exercise control.”

  Lonny’s success at integrating work and family is to a great degree a consequence of the success of her marriage. David’s mother was a professional, which perhaps better prepared him for a professional wife. He and Lonny also avoided all possibility of competition with one another. Each had clear, separate domains of authority. David was financier and ship captain. Lonny did what she calls “the traditional woman’s work” as mother, teacher, and healer, and “yielded to his command in public.” Temperamentally, too, David and Lonny seem ideal complements. Lonny has a great gift for commotion;
when she is inflamed by some cause or memory, her pale blue eyes deepen with a fierce intensity and she speaks almost too quickly to keep up with, hyperalert and pacing like a high-strung thoroughbred with long athletic strides. She is a great jolting pleasure to be with, and exhausting as fireworks. She is both candid and inaccessible to the extreme. Her rush seems at moments a rush past something, some fear or pain that would paralyze her if she slowed for it. David, by contrast, is endlessly calm, a steadying ballast in her life. Thirty years after he first began pursuing Lonny, he seems still fascinated by her; he was happy all those years aboard ship, he says, to have been the conveyance carrying Lonny to her work.

  More than such particularities, the success of Lonny’s experiment seems a consequence of her having broken open the nuclear family. The Higginses have never been shuttered in safety, seeking in their small clan all companionship and intimacy and mutual obligation. Rather, they have always lived with some larger definition of kinship. At sea, there were the crew and medical team; aboard ship, as in a frontier town, all depended on one another for their very survival. In their house on Oahu and, since 1998, on the Big Island, there is Dana, a young woman who fled a marriage to a violent drug dealer and, with her three boys, found shelter with the Higginses. Dana earns their keep by managing the house—overseeing repairs, paying bills, shopping, and cleaning. There is also a foster son, a kid of desperately troubled parents, who has been in and out of jail and substance abuse programs since the age of thirteen. For a time, there was a second foster child: After Lonny delivered the baby of a homeless schizophrenic woman and Child Protective Services insisted on removing the child, Lonny herself became the infant’s foster parent, so the mother could make daily visits. Lonny’s work frequently places her in such exceptionally intimate relations with strangers. Historically, it has always been women who helped other women give birth. In that role, Lonny and her fellow midwives have crossed in and out between the public and the private: learning secrets of the family and carrying knowledge among women—of erotic pleasures, fertility, contraception, abortion.

  It’s not mysterious what makes it work for these women—for Janet Hill or Lonny Higgins or the numerous other working mothers in the class who are faring just fine. All have in common, first, great flexibility in their work, in terms of both the time and the place in which it gets done, a flexibility often won by educating themselves into a high degree of leverage or by going into business for themselves, as 30 percent of the class has done. All also have husbands with flexible jobs who are themselves deeply engaged in child rearing. All have money. All have relatively few children, and most had those children either early or late (though for those who married young, divorce was also more likely). Most important, all have fairly porous boundaries as to who counts as family and where children belong. Their experience contravenes the much-advertised conclusion by Judith Wallerstein in her 1995 study of “the good marriage” that the dual-earner couple—pulled apart by competitiveness, loneliness, and stress—is “frighteningly fragile.”

  Working motherhood has been much harder, of course, for those women in the class who have not had flexibility or money or engaged husbands or who have had to contend with divorce or stepchildren or illness.

  Ann Landsberg married shortly after graduating from Wellesley, “because I was frantic to get settled and didn’t think I’d get another shot, and had found someone who seemed a good match: John had this long Yankee pedigree, everyone from the best colleges.” They settled in Somerville, a faded working-class suburb of Boston, and Ann began working with poor children in the community mental health center. When her son, Jamie, was born in 1979, she went to a half-time work schedule in order to be home after day care and school. When Jamie was four, Ann’s marriage came to an end.

  “My husband had been ambivalent about getting married, and after thirteen years he still was. Then he read a book about people needing their own space, and took it to heart. We had a lot of marriage counseling. But there was no hope of creating either the sort of relationship I wanted from him or the kind of nonrelationship he wanted from me. We did almost nothing together, except for a lot of unilateral fighting. I was forever going after him trying to engage him; when I quit, there was nothing happening at all. After a while, all James was seeing was fighting. All I heard from my parents was, ‘Think about the child; think about the child.’ I did, and decided he did not need to grow up in a house with a woman who was a shrew and a man who was a patsy. And I could not continue my slow death. John and I were not even like roommates, there was so much tension. It was so awful. I finally decided an intact family of any sort is not better than none.”

  Remarried in 1984 to a man she had met in church, Ann stumbled on the effort to mix two families. “In the blush of first romance, everything seemed fine. Tim was just a boyfriend, and Jamie’s father was four blocks away. For a while, they mostly avoided each other. But the fact was, Tim and Jamie did not like each other for a long time and I was in high denial about that. I kept feeling divided loyalties. When I would get on a tirade at Jamie, Tim would join in: ‘You heard what your mother said,’ and my fury would turn on him. I did not need a cheering section. Then I got pregnant. I was thirty-eight. I worried what it would do to Jamie to have a sibling with a live-in father. My attachment to Jamie knew no limits, and I felt treasonous. We also had two days a week with no kid, when James was at his dad’s house, and I thought, Oh my God, it is going to be here every day. Did we really want to start over again, voluntarily throw ourselves into chaos? But an abortion would have devastated me. I would still be trying to get over it. Finally, we just threw ourselves into the joy of it. This is a much better marriage, even though Tim and I have radically different backgrounds; his dad was a traveling salesman, and he was the first in his family to go to college. But our marriage works, because he is quite selfless, and I’m a lot less needy, and we were best friends before we were lovers, and because both of us had trashed a marriage and knew what we didn’t want to do again—that we wanted to deal with difficulties and not just try to bury them.”

  Ann’s second marriage has been greatly tested. At age four, their son, Max, was diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome. “I knew something was wrong much earlier, but I was patronized by the medical profession for two years. They wouldn’t even say, ‘Yes, something’s wrong, but we don’t know what it is.’ When they finally made the diagnosis, I wanted to say, ‘You assholes, I told you my kid had a genetic disorder. What, am I only the child’s mother with a graduate degree in child development; should I know anything?’ We went through a great period of grief and stress. Sometimes still, it hits as if the first time. Then you weep until you’re done weeping, pick up the laundry, and move on.”

  For more than a decade, Ann has worked as a mental health consultant for Head Start. She observes classes, advises teachers, and makes visits to homes and emergency shelters to talk to parents with toddlers, giving them the address of a food pantry or sitting on the floor to play with the babies and help parents understand their kids’ development. It is a job faithful to her youthful idealism and to her generation’s belief in the need for social involvement in family life. “The first mom I hooked up with had just been released from jail. This was the first time she’d been alone with her nine-month-old; they were in a room with three pieces of furniture, no toys, and a box of doughnuts, and she looked utterly lost.”

  When these children enter the Boston public schools, often classed as special-needs kids, Ann frequently acts as their advocate. She has been especially distressed, therefore, by another dilemma familiar to her classmates—the difficulty of keeping her own kids in public school. While these women were at Wellesley, many were deeply affected by Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age, which exposed the damaging inequalities in public schools. A number volunteered at his storefront learning center, and most embraced the principle that well-educated parents ought to keep their kids in public schools and commit their own energies there. Ann had
not been happy when her first husband insisted that Jamie attend private school. “It was all white and precious. I had one of the few non-Jaguars in the lot. It was the last place I wanted my kid.” Because she worked for the public schools in the progressive suburb of Brookline, Ann was able to move Jamie there. “I was thrilled he could be part of a whole ragtag mix, with Cambodian and Costa Rican and black kids all bused in.”

  By the time Max was entering kindergarten, the Brookline schools were overenrolled; the budget had been cut; Ann was laid off, and Max could not get in. Though fearing it would be “a snake pit” for a kid with Tourette’s, his parents saw little alternative but to send him into the notoriously troubled Boston public schools. Bright and eager, Max skipped a grade. But he hated school. “He wasn’t getting what he needed intellectually. The homework was boring, and the atmosphere was small-minded and managerial: ‘If you’re noisy in line, you can’t go to science class.’ I understand it. They had too many kids with problems, and resources were strained way beyond capacity. They did their best, but that was not very good. Max was with kids with legitimate reasons to be off the wall—one kid’s mother had been murdered and he was living in a group home. But it was an impossible place for him. He contaminates easily, and doesn’t have brakes. He’d get set off and just keep going. I decided it’s not fair: He’s a sponge; he’s fascinated; he’s got a zest for life you can’t imagine; and he’s withering in this environment. None of the good stuff has a chance to blossom. It’s so demoralized and hopeless.” Ann’s sense of defeat came through in a letter she wrote to her classmates. “Yesterday, Max’s hard-won collection of trading cards was stolen by a classmate in the second Max was getting his jacket. Max was devastated. He could not comprehend how someone could be so mean, and he hopes the cards will be returned following his teacher’s intervention. I am not so sure.