by Robin Romm
So I must dispense with a metaphor that is beginning to sound essentialist, as if I’m speaking of watery vaginas and tall penises. And who cares about anatomy, really. Anatomy is tiresome. Men, women, women, men, women becoming men, men becoming women, and everything in between, I celebrate this, I say yes to this, and I think, yes, let’s all become each other! But forget anatomy. Let’s just be kind.
You, my mother, enjoy thinking. You like to contemplate, you are worried that death will be without consciousness, you worry about leaving it all behind. I wonder if your worry about mission is really a worry about leaving consciousness behind. What if consciousness persisted somehow? If that was not a worry, would there still be something you wished you had done? What would that thing be?
You have done so much but in your mind it does not add up. How many plays have you been in? More than a hundred, I’m sure. Joan of Arc, Peter Pan, Dull Gret—all these women and boys you’ve been for the sheer pleasure of doing it. Does it only count if you’re in the midst? Does it only count if something is left behind? What is permanent? Words, works? Children? Education? How many young women have you educated? The Odyssey that you poured into young women’s minds at Regina Dominican High School, the Dickens you poured into their often-disinterested minds? What of your PhD? Captured over the age of fifty, scaling the theoreticians while almost bowled over with grief over your husband’s early death? Does that count? Does making sure your daughters grew up solid after their father died count? Would fame count? Everything perishes eventually; it’s only a matter of degrees.
Apparently, we don’t get to take anything with us. Not our children, not our fame. We go alone. Our sense of mission or ambition sustains us during our lifetime, and then if we’re lucky, we go on to the next lifetime.
What if our mission was, as the critic Walter Pater put it, “not to sleep before evening”? He writes:
Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us—for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us . . . is to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendor of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.
Does Pater’s vision count as ambition or mission? You have done what Walter Pater asks your whole life, do you know that? You are probably doing it even now. Please don’t be sad, Mom. You’ve had a mission all along.
Love,
Sarah
P.S. This is probably altogether the wrong kind of essay to write. It should be about women not fearing the word ambition and telling our daughters to lean in. And I wrote of being suspicious of ambition and how to be content with death and how to stare out at a window with passionate excitement. Oh, well. Maybe I should also write to my daughters. If I were to write a letter to my daughters, I might say:
Dear Anna and Hope,
When you were small children, there was a controversy in feminist circles about “leaning in” versus “leaning out.” And I say to you, formidable creatures, don’t lean in, don’t lean out, stand up straight for God’s sake! You’re going to need all your strength and all your posture because you will be juggling planets and plates on a new historical stage in which women will have babies while running governments. You will have lots of new “of courses” that I didn’t have when I was a girl. Of course women can be president. Of course women can marry women. (After the last gay wedding I came back from, you, my older daughter, Anna, seemed pensive. I started to explain to you that men can marry men, and you said, exasperated, I know all that, Mom, I’m just wondering, when do you think Mark and Todd will have babies?) So. Of course gay people can have children. Of course women can be president. But there will still be confusions.
You know your yellow Dr. Seuss book My Book about Me? I also had this book when I was a child. I filled in the blanks about myself. On the very first page, the book reads: “I am a boy” or “I am a girl” with two little boxes to check one or the other. As a five-year-old, I crossed out both boxes and wrote “P-R-S-O-N.” “I am a person,” or “prson.” Spelling person with no “e” makes the word more vulnerable to substitution—add an “i” and you have prison. “I am a prison.” But no matter. Somehow I knew even at the tender age of five that checking either one of those boxes was dangerous. I don’t know whether or not I resolutely thought gender was a prison, or if I was just trying to be accurate in the way that writers are.
However, I kept my yellow My Book about Me and kept adding to it as I got older—a testament to the fluidity of identity over time, several words are crossed out, rewritten, revised. At around age six, I crossed out “prson,” and in pen, I checked the box: girl. I am a girl—so, ipso facto, I am no longer a person. Person got crossed out. It took only one year for me to be schooled in the way of the world. Apparently, I could not be a “me” without also having a gender.
Eighteen years after the Dr. Seuss book, and after having written many poems, short stories, and the occasional play, I took a class in college called The Problem of the Woman Writer. I thought: What’s the problem? Is there a problem? A problem with women writing? A problem with women? Or with women writing? I was compelled to take the class. It was a taught by a brilliant feminist scholar named Ellen Rooney, and at first I barely understood a word she said, so laden was her speech with words like semiotics and phallogocentric. I was desperate to learn her language. I was so intimidated by her that once, when we found ourselves next to each other at stalls in the bathroom, I could not pee and talk to her at the same time. Instead, I crumpled some paper to make it sound like I had some other purpose.
On the first day of her seminar, The Problem of the Woman Writer, we discussed an essay by the feminist theorist Luce Irigaray called “Speculum of the Other Woman.” We spent a long time talking about the fairly abstract argument. Finally I raised my hand, an eighteen-year-old from Illinois, and asked, “What is a speculum?” One senior yawned, and a couple of the other women looked at me, curious. I thought it must be some philosophical term. I hadn’t yet had my first gynecological exam. I was schooled that day. A speculum was no more, and no less, than a metal medical tool inserted into a woman’s vagina, so that her insides can be seen.
It has been twenty-two years since I read the “Speculum of the Other Woman,” and now I am hard-pressed to remember the substance of the essay, only that I was ashamed in front of other smart women to have asked what a speculum was. I didn’t have the language for a concrete object that was to have opened me, made me seen, by a medical expert.
Since that time, my daughters, I have had three children including both of you, and I have lost all shame. When you give vaginal birth to twins, you become used to a roomful of people looking inside you, seeing what you cannot see. Gender when I was five years old was abstract—something that could be crossed out—I am a prson. Gender became more concrete at age six, when I wrote, “I am a girl.” And then when I was eighteen, gender became abstract again—something to be analyzed, something that could be a philosophical problem. But gender when a male doctor is pulling a breech baby out of your vagina—that is very concrete.
I found it easier to be a feminist before I had children. Not the title, mind you. The negotiations. (By the way, I just put on three eggs to boil for breakfast.) There are multiple questions that must be asked every moment of every day: Do I do this or that? Or: Should my husband actually be doing this or that? How important is my work? If my child is vomiting, is that more important than my work? Yes. If my child has a weaving exhibit, is that more important than my work? Questionable. The: How can I write at all amidst constant interruption? Can I still think? Is thinking still a value? I believe that it is.
People sometime
s ask me if I have trouble with being described as a woman writer. Many women writers don’t like it. Virginia Woolf said in A Room of One’s Own that an artist’s mind should be androgynous. She writes, “Perhaps to think . . . of one sex as distinct from the other is an effort. It interferes with the unity of the mind.” Woolf described Shakespeare and Coleridge as having androgynous minds, incandescent, the fusion of man and woman within one brain creating a sort of fusion in which, she wrote, “the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine.”
Virginia Woolf also said that “a woman writing thinks back through her mothers.” She was very exacting with her punctuation and her spelling: She said “mothers,” plural. Not just our own mother, but when we write we think back through our mothers. Did she mean our nonbiological mothers, our chosen mothers, our literary mothers? (For me: Paula Vogel, Toni Morrison, Marianne Moore, Jane Bowles, Jane Austen, Alice Walker, Elizabeth Bishop, and so on.) Or did she mean our mother’s mothers? Or did she mean, in the Buddhist sense (and it’s difficult to imagine Woolf as a Buddhist somehow, but still) that we’ve all been reincarnated countless times and that we have had many mothers?
There is a Tibetan Buddhist prayer in which you think closely about your mother. You imagine all the impossible tasks she did for you, all the ways in which she suffered for you, all the care and compassion she gave you to keep you alive. Then in your mind, you offer your mother all of your happiness, and take all of her suffering for yourself.
Imagine for a moment that you take all of your mother’s suffering and give her (though she may be dead) all of your joy, and success. Then imagine that someday you will have a daughter. Maybe an actual daughter, or a literary daughter. Imagine that she is wishing you success, and happiness, and taking your suffering in order to transform it. Imagine that we are all connected, a rising circle, wishing each other well. Paula Vogel, my teacher, always taught me that circles rise, and I believe this. How to be ambitious about circles? Is this the feminist contribution to theories of ambition? That ambition can be a circle rather than a line?
I recently read a feminist critique of the idea that women’s ambition must tend toward the collective and relational. And I realized that I have a confusion about the word ambition untethered to an object. Doesn’t the nature of ambition change depending on the goal? It is different to be an ambitious capitalist, an ambitious peace-worker, an ambitious socialite, an ambitious pope. And what of an ambitious writer? The very phrase fills me with dread, vaguely makes me want to vomit. I suppose because the nature of ambition seems contrary to grace, and so much of writing is waiting for sentences to come. There is the ass-in-chair part of the writing, the doing of it, and then there is the other part, the part that comes unbidden. Is ambition a refusal of unbidden gifts? Or is a woman who refuses to admit to her own ambition nothing more than the woman who, historically, is not supposed to show her own desire?
What do I wish for you, my daughters? My mother, your grandmother, wrote me back after I wrote her that letter yesterday about ambition. She wrote me that when she was a child she used to pray to a Catholic God: “Please let me get one hundred on my test and be a nice person.” Daughters, I hope that when you grow up you don’t see any opposition between being smart and being nice. I hope if you get married that you marry men who are feminists or women who are supportive of your ambitions. I hope the two of you are friends. I hope one of you does not eclipse the other with blind ambition. Ah—is that what my fear of ambition is based on? That it would be unseemly to eclipse your sister, especially if you meant to? Does ambition eclipse sisterhood? Can we be ambitious about raising up other women?
Girls, do you remember the time when one of you was watching the other play soccer? Anna, your team was demolishing the other team. The other team seemed to have no one cheering for them on the sidelines. So, at one point, I cheered for the other team because I felt bad for them. “Good block!” I said. Hope, you were on my lap watching your big sister play. Hope, you turned to me with rage and said, “Why aren’t you cheering for my sister?” “I am!” I said. Your brow darkened and you said, “Then why did you say ‘Good block’? ” I now want to print T-shirts that say: “Why aren’t you cheering for my sister?” So focused were you on cheering for your own sister that my cheering for another team produced rage. Is ambition always predicated on competition—and what does it mean to cheer for our sister, and even on occasion, to cheer for the other team?
Maybe it’s not enough to tell our daughters to be ambitious. We need to redefine ambition to include love. This new definition might have a new spelling: ambission. Ambission might include love for the world, love for work, love for our sisters, love for others. If ambition includes love, then, daughters: I hope that you do not fear ambition, that you do not see ambition as something that eclipses mission. That you see ambition as a mindful, skillful way of making concrete a mission you have found. I hope you find your mission. I hope the world is kind to you. I hope when I get old you are nice to me.
That word again: nice! Anna, your first word was actually two words: “good girl.” For too long women have wanted to be good girls, and being a good girl meant not being ambitious. We had to be the guardians of virtue because there was so much rape and plunder—someone had to be good. I hope that you are both good, but with strong internal compasses, not good always by the standards of others. I hope you are ambitious for yourselves and for others. I hope when you are in college there is no class called The Problem of the Woman Writer because the woman writer as a category is no longer problematic.
People sometimes ask me if I have trouble being described as a woman writer. Am I a woman writer? Damn right I am. And now I have to go make your lunch.
Love,
Your mama
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES
ELISA ALBERT is the author of the novels After Birth and The Book of Dahlia, the short story collection How This Night Is Different, and editor of the anthology Freud’s Blind Spot. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Tin House, Time magazine, the New York Times, and the Guardian.
HAWA ALLAN is a writer of cultural criticism, fiction, and poetry whose work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, and Transition, among other places. She is also a graduate of Columbia Law School, where she was a fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Culture.
BLAIR BRAVERMAN is a dogsled racer and author of Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube.
ALLISON BARRETT CARTER (allisonbarrettcarter.com) is a stay-at-home mom who lives on the coast in North Carolina. She struggles to find time to write but is so inspired by her family that she gladly sacrifices sleep to work on her creative nonfiction essays. Her pieces have appeared on numerous sites such as the New York Times’s Well Family, the Washington Post’s On Parenting, Redbook, Verily Magazine, Role Reboot, and Elephant Journal. She frequently contributes to local magazines and can be found in several print anthologies, including Chicken Soup for the Soul. She may someday write and travel, but she won’t be a lawyer.
LAN SAMANTHA CHANG was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, where she attended public schools with her sisters Tai, Tina, and Ling. Her parents, Nai Lin Chang and Helen Chung-Hung Chang, emigrated from Beijing and Shanghai in the 1950s. Samantha is the author of two novels, Inheritance and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, and a collection, Hunger. She has received fellowships from Stanford, Princeton, and Harvard Universities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Library in Paris. She lives with her husband, Robert Caputo, and her daughter, Tai Antonia, in Iowa City, where she teaches at and directs the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
MARCIA CHATELAIN, a native of Chicago, is associate professor of History and African American Studies at Georgetown University. As a little girl, Marcia fed her intellectual curiosity with Nancy Drew books, and she dreamed of solving mysteries involving secr
et staircases and old clocks. After graduating high school, Marcia realized that she was too risk averse to pursue detective work, so she pursued degrees in magazine journalism and religious studies at the University of Missouri—Columbia. Storytelling and student activism introduced Marcia to the power of research and teaching, and she was led to Brown University’s PhD program in American Civilization. Marcia is the author of South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration, an examination of the experiences of girls and young women during the historic movement of African Americans from the South to Chicago in the early twentieth century. Marcia is a proud Harry S. Truman Scholar, a recipient of the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Diversity Fellowship, and has served on the Board of Girl Scouts of Western Oklahoma. When she isn’t searching for clues, she enjoys hosting her weekly podcast, Office Hours: A Podcast, which features Marcia talking to students about the things that are most important to them.
ELIZABETH COREY is an associate professor of political science at Baylor University, in Waco, Texas, where she also serves as director of the honors program. She has received several awards for teaching and research and is currently a 2016–2017 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow. Her writing has appeared in First Things and the Atlantic, as well as in a variety of scholarly journals. She received a bachelor’s in classics from Oberlin College, and master’s and doctoral degrees in art history and political science from Louisiana State University. She is coeditor of the Radical Conservatisms book series at the University of Pennsylvania Press. Elizabeth’s more popular writing generally concerns the question of what it means to live as a traditionalist in a progressive world—engaging social and political questions in a way that aims to be both charitable and critical at once. Most importantly, she is the mother of three children: Anna Katherine (eleven), John (nine), and Margaret (two). In her role as a wife and mother, she does a great deal of grocery shopping, laundry, reading books aloud, and generally enjoying the ability of her children to live in the moment.