Double Bind

by Robin Romm

  When it came time to take the bar exam, I had a little talk with myself. I told myself I didn’t have to practice law, but that I couldn’t fall asleep or have a sneezing attack that would drive me from the room. I convinced myself and passed. I took a job in western Massachusetts working for the only woman lawyer in the county. I’d found her by knocking on her door, résumé in hand. By chance, she too had gone to Radcliffe. Class of 1953.

  Three years later, looking for a reason to break away from what had become my life, I went to Jerusalem for what turned into a three-year stay. I told my family I wanted to explore my Jewish roots. The closest friends I made there were Radcliffe graduates. Some were in their twenties, others well into their thirties. There had been no reunion or institutionalized gathering bringing us together; that’s just who I met. We all had the same story. We’d been good students and successes in the world and had received praise for skills and talents that didn’t really fit who we were. We’d bucked traditional female roles, lived up to our potential, and now we wanted to escape. Each of us had found an excuse to get away—one to explore the religion, another to solidify her conversion and try to save her marriage, a third to teach English and get over a divorce—but all of us were just trying to figure out who we were and what we wanted.

  Decades later, after I’d begun to publish short stories, my father, then in his eighties, told me he’d always wondered why I’d become a lawyer when he knew I loved literature.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said, surprised, even a little upset. He knew? Better than I had? Why didn’t you say anything?

  “Because,” he answered, “you never asked.”

  1. Karen W. Arenson, “Mary Bunting-Smith, Ex-President of Radcliffe, Dies at 87,” New York Times, January 23, 1998, accessed September 9, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/23/us/mary-bunting-smith-ex-president-of-radcliffe-dies-at-87.html.

  Doubly Denied

  CRISTINA HENRÍQUEZ

  I called my mother. I said, “Am I ambitious?”

  She said, “You? Yes.”

  “Really?”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “What’s your evidence?” I asked.

  “Well, you’ve been successful. You’re good at what you do.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’ve wanted things. You wanted to go to graduate school, for example, and you did it.”

  “But is that because I’m ambitious?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  I emailed a friend. I wrote: “Question. Would you say I’m ambitious?”

  She wrote back: “sure. i mean, you’ve accomplished a hell of a lot in your thirty-something years, so you’re definitely something. why??”

  I wrote: “I have to write an essay about ambition, and I can’t figure out if I am ambitious.”

  Her response: “maybe you’re committed. is that how you spell that? anyway. you’re the real deal—you work regularly, you stay in touch with the world of literature. you clearly HAVE ambition. or ambitions.”

  I asked my husband as we sat on the couch one night, watching television, “What’s the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done?”

  He looked at me for a few seconds, thinking. Then he said, “What’s the definition of ambitious?”

  Exactly.

  It was only a word, but I kept dancing around it. If someone had asked, I might have said I was tenacious, or that I worked hard, or that I was diligent, or determined, but I never would have said I was ambitious. My mother was right. I had wanted things out of life, but simple desire doesn’t necessarily mean a person is ambitious. Ambition, it seemed, was something that other people possessed—men mostly, or Hillary Clinton—but it wasn’t something that felt quite like me. But why not?

  I lay in bed at night thinking about it. I conjured up memories of when I was just starting college and the thought was forming that maybe, possibly I would like to be a writer, and that maybe, possibly, I had what it would take to make that happen. What kind of writer, I didn’t know (in an admissions interview I had been asked what I liked to write and my response was, “Letters”), but a fantasy was taking root in my mind about a life where writing was at the center, a vision that included things like scarves and coffee and stacks of well-worn books, and me, by candlelight, scribbling into the night.

  I went to Northwestern University, halfway across the country from Delaware, where I lived, and I used to wander along the edge of Lake Michigan and through the majestic, neo-Gothic Deering Library, awed by where I had ended up. I knew by then that I loved writing, but I still didn’t know exactly what I would do with it. Would I actually write books? That seemed like a wild, far-off dream.

  Not long into my freshman year, though, I learned that Northwestern had an undergraduate writing program. It was highly competitive, and each year students applied with the hopes that they, and their work, would be deemed worthy. At the end of my sophomore year, I submitted a manuscript, a few very short stories, and waited to learn my fate. I don’t remember how the news was delivered, but when it came, I do remember feeling that I had been punched in the gut. I didn’t get in.

  I could have stopped there, I guess. I could have interpreted the rejection as the universe’s way of telling me that I should find something else to do. But although I was devastated (I wrote entry after tearful journal entry about it), I was stubborn, too. I applied to the program again the following year. That time, I was accepted.

  A similar story played out when I was leaving college. My wild dream of writing books for a living had solidified by then, and I thought the best course would be to go to graduate school to learn how to do that. I knew almost nothing about graduate programs, so I found a copy of U.S. News & World Report and looked up the most recent rankings of graduate writing programs, chose five in the top ten, and applied. Every single one turned me down.

  For the next two years, I worked in the publicity department at a university press. During my lunch break I wrote stories—one about people stuck in an elevator, one about cliff-jumping during the summer, one about a man who cuts off his pinky finger—and at the end of the day, I went home to my studio apartment and wrote more, banging out stories on the manual typewriter I had bought at a church sale. When the stories were finished, I put them in envelopes and mailed them to a former professor, who read them and gave me feedback that he jotted down and mailed back to me. I sent stories to magazines, ridiculous pipe dreams like the New Yorker and the Atlantic and Zoetrope and BOMB, and all of them got rejected. Incredibly, none of it put me off course. Eventually I applied to graduate programs again. Different ones this time, and I submitted different material. I hoped—God, I hoped—it would be enough.

  It was. The first school I heard back from was the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the top-ranked program in the country, telling me I had gotten in.

  Was it tenacity? Resilience? Just plain hardheadedness? Or could it have been ambition, churning somewhere inside of me all that time? And if so, why was it so difficult for me to simply call it what it was?

  Growing up, I can’t recall any discussion of ambition in my house—at least, not in an overt way. I was the oldest of three, and though expectations were high (A’s were good, A-pluses were better), my parents gave all of us wide berth to explore our interests. They opened doors, as many as they could, and then left it up to us whether we would walk through. In grade school, they rented me a violin when I said I wanted to learn. They bought me the books I wanted to read from every Scholastic book fair. They went out of their way to plan trips so that my brother and sister and I would have the benefit of encountering new places. They allowed my natural enthusiasm—and from that my ambition—­to flourish on its own, in its time, and then let me follow it in any direction I chose. In certain ways, this seems like one of the best gifts a parent could give a child.

  And yet, when it came time for me to start thinking about college, I do remember my father telling me, “I think y
ou should apply to Princeton.”

  I remember I laughed.

  This was at the time when bulging envelopes filled with glossy folders and brochures touting the glories of schools all over the country arrived daily in the mailbox. I lay on my bed and pored over them, captivated by photographs of happy students walking through leaves and sitting on grassy lawns in the sun.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “It’s a good school.”

  I thought he was nuts, of course, but when I look back on it now, I see that my father was trying to teach me something. He must have known how improbable it was for me to go to Princeton. (Northwestern, where I ended up going, was enough of a long shot.) But it’s important, he seemed to be telling me, to reach for things that might seem beyond your grasp. The only way to get further is to reach further, after all. To be ambitious is to connect yourself to the future. It’s a movement outward, forward, toward something new.

  It’s not surprising that it’s a lesson I learned from my father. When he was eighteen, my father came from Panama to the United States to study chemical engineering at the University of Delaware. It was the first time he had been away from home, and he traveled by himself with a trunk and a suitcase and a student visa in his pocket. He came with hope and fear and what surely can only be described as ambition. To be an immigrant, after all, to uproot your life, to walk away from everything you have known with the goal of going somewhere new and with the hope of finding something better is to be, necessarily, ambitious.

  But if his leaving Panama seemed the very embodiment of ambition, my father also brought with him certain attitudes that seemed to undermine it, at least where women were concerned. He was raised in a culture that operates within the structure of traditional gender roles, which meant, for example, that he expected my mother to serve him dinner every night, no matter how late he arrived home from work, and that he had to adjust when she wanted to get a job after my brother, sister, and I were grown. I saw all of that, of course. And seeing it against the backdrop of my father’s personal story, I received two messages about ambition, both of which came through loud and clear: the importance of striving and the importance of staying put.

  A year after my first book had been published, more than a decade after my father brought up Princeton, I had my first child. I lived halfway across the country from my parents by then, so as often as I could I called my mother on the webcam. I was in the throes of new motherhood, lonely and feeling much of the time like I had been sideswiped by a truck. In those early months, I struggled, as many new parents do, to get through the days. My husband was back at work, and I shuffled around in my bathrobe, which I didn’t even have the energy to tie, and nursed my daughter while I gazed down at her long eyelashes and full cheeks, and fell asleep on the couch when I could, and stared in the mirror at the deep blue circles under my eyes, and tried to make sense of what had happened to me. My mother was my savior. Over the computer, she sympathized and told me how hard it had been for her at the beginning. She recounted being home with young children, being far from family, the consuming loneliness when my father was traveling for work, as he often did. She told me in no uncertain terms how important it was to be doing what I was doing, how important it was to have this time to bond with my daughter. She believed, she said to me more than once, that when they could, when financially it was a viable option, at least one parent should stay home to be with their children. She was trying to comfort me, I know, to assure me that I was doing something good, even noble. But she was sending another message, too: It was what I was supposed to be doing.

  I had decided by then that I was going to try to stay home with my daughter. I was in the middle of my first novel, but I could write while she napped, I reasoned. I could write at night. And later, when my daughter was in preschool, I could use that time to write, too. I wouldn’t get the book finished quite as fast, but that was okay. Eventually I would complete it. Eventually I would get back on track.

  Except that I never did.

  Writing during naptimes was a bust. It was laughable that I thought that would work. Evenings were a bust, too. Most nights, all I could do was stuff a new breast pad into my nursing bra before collapsing in bed. And preschool, of course, was still years away. Oh, they go fast! everyone always tells you. Maybe, but I needed the time right then.

  The longer I went without writing, the more frustrated I became. I was crazy about my daughter, utterly in love. But I missed connecting to that part of myself I had honed over so many years. And I couldn’t figure out a way to get writing back into my life. Or not, I should say, a way that didn’t involve leaving my daughter for periods of time. “Hire someone,” my husband told me. “Your work is important.” But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I kept hearing my mother’s voice in my head, telling me how vital it was to be at home. If I didn’t do that, would I have failed? But if I didn’t continue writing, wouldn’t I be failing in another way? Had I turned into a walking cliché of the woman who wants it all?

  When people asked me what I did, sometimes I said that I was writer, but more and more I started answering that I was a stay-at-home mother. “I’m surprised to even hear you describe yourself that way,” a friend of mine said. But wasn’t it the truth? The overwhelming majority of my time was spent taking care of my child or taking care of the house. Writing was just something I was squeezing in—a quick paragraph while I sat in the car in a parking lot because my daughter had fallen asleep in her car seat, a page or two on a weekend morning when my husband was around—if I was doing it at all.

  The imbalance altered my sense of identity and, along with it, my concept of my own ambition. Ambition is a word that most people associate with professional life, after all. Ask someone if they see themselves as ambitious, and if they answer yes, most of the time they will tell you about something related to their career. And yet, motherhood exists outside of the bounds of professionalism in our country. It’s not a job, society tells mothers, at least not a real one. And because it’s not viewed that way, the concept of ambition gets divorced from the concept of motherhood. Insofar as I identified as a stay-at-home mother, I didn’t identify as someone who had—at least not anymore—much ambition at all.

  Eventually, I did hire a sitter. I asked her to come only three mornings a week—a compromise with myself. It was enough time to slowly, slowly finish my second book. But the decision was fraught. I was happy to be writing again, even in limited doses, but I felt awful every time I walked out the door. “Why?” my husband kept asking me, genuinely confounded. It would be different, I told him, if I were going to an office and getting a regular paycheck. At least then I would have something to show for it.

  “But you will have something to show for it one day,” he argued.

  “But what if it takes me ten years to finish this book?”

  “So? That’s like me saying what if I only got paid once every ten years? It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t go to work every day.”

  It was all so cut-and-dry for him, which I found incredible and also made me a little resentful. Why was it so easy for him to walk out the door each morning, while I felt trapped inside this dense tangle of choices and guilt and expectation and desire? But I saw his point. What if I really didn’t finish a book or get paid again for another ten years? What if I never published a book and never got paid? What if I kept writing merely because I wanted to? Because I had this fire in me that wouldn’t die out, and I wanted to feed it? Because every time I sat down to write I had the thought that I wanted to create something great? Wasn’t that ambition? The urge to reach for something beyond what I had accomplished in the past, to strive toward new heights? Why did I feel like I needed the promise of some financial reward or public acknowledgment before I could claim my own ambition, before I could say, yes, I want to do this thing? Was I looking for permission to be ambitious, to really grab hold of it, because I didn’t believe I deserved to claim it otherwise? Had I been shying away from the word all this time
because I didn’t feel I deserved it, not unless someone else told me I did?

  Years and years ago, when I applied to Northwestern and got in, a friend of mine who hadn’t been accepted said to me, “You know the only reason they let you in is because you’re Hispanic, right?” I can only assume he meant it as a joke, though it came across as anything but. Affirmative action. Quotas. Dumb luck. These are the reasons I got what I got. It could not have been that I had worked hard for years, toiling over papers in my room, staying up late to study. It could not have been that I was naturally curious, a high school student who was reading Dylan Thomas and Samuel Beckett and the letters of Zelda Fitzgerald in her spare time. It could not have been my record of community service nor my strong GPA. It could not have been that I wrote one hell of an admissions essay. It could not have been, simply, me.

  A woman is denied her ambition on the grounds of gender. Ambition is active, not passive; it’s forceful, not meek; it’s stubborn, not yielding. It’s everything that society tells women not to be. It’s unfeminine, for goodness sake! And yet to be a woman of color—even a woman of some color, like me—is to be told all of that and more. A woman of color who exhibits ambition and who makes good on that ambition to achieve something, no matter how big or how small, is often told—subtly, overtly, it doesn’t matter—that she didn’t actually achieve much at all, and that what she did achieve, she didn’t deserve. To be a woman of color is to be doubly denied.