9:33 a.m. - 2005-05-26
Feminist Rant
Magnetized by the pink tree, I did my best to resist the pull of the sullen girl ever huddling, pen in hand, within the landscape of my mind. I focused my energies on being a doting mother. Our new son was so easy to love. I took a couple of evening classes just to keep a toe ring in the academic door, while Fred stayed with the baby. He had no problem with that. The baby's bedtime was 6:30 p.m and Fred enjoyed watching sports and throwing back Oreoes without the aggravation of my attempts to 'relate'. Days were filled with the wonder of each new experience as seen through our son's shiny eyes. His first trip to the zoo. The pony rides in Griffith Park. Magic Mountain. Disneyland. One entire summer, there were daily trips to Santa Monica beach with Meridee, who had managed to have four children by the age of nineteen (counting twins that could not be told apart unless they smiled, revealing distinguisable dimples). Early in the morning, all seven of us would pile into her cavernous metal van the color of an oilstain. My son was safely secured in a carseat while her four literally rolled around free-range in the back. She was what you might call carefree. She looked like Candice Bergan in Soldier Blue, strong and tanned with clear blue eyes. We set up camp on Will Rodger's stretch of beach. Meridee would bring along an expandable circular wooden fence that allowed all five toddlers their own private beach. Meridee and I would fill a small wading pool with ocean water and drag it up the shore to the makeshift playpen. The kids were cleverly contained and safe while enjoying the full experience of sand and surf. Meanwhile, Meridee and I would weave macrame jewelry in the California sun, talking about everything. Everything meaning that emptiness and angst that didn't seem to subside no matter how much more was thrown into the mix. The culture was insistent that we were entitled to 'have it all'. It was, in fact, our duty as women be multi-tasked and endlessly productive. We were expected to develop meaningful careers, be artists and writers and students and mothers and activists and feminists and let our underarms sprout in visible protest against cultural oppression and Hugh Heffner's idea of beauty and to demonstrate solidarity with the women of the world whose no-good men had abandoned them and who were having trouble feeding their babies and certainly did not have the luxury of pink plastic razors let alone the traitorous desire to use them. You get the drill. We were advised that "a woman needs a man the way a fish needs a bicycle" and anything short of that was a treacherous sabotage of sisterhood, punishable by shame and exclusion from the twentieth century. In the name of 'liberation', we eagerly took up residence in Suffragette City, unwittingly accepting the thankless task of evolving our gender in just one passionate generation into the men we sought to escape. Neat trick. Our dubious reward? We were not, after all, our parents. This is what we had relentlessly sought to avoid all our collective lives. Done. So one evening, fresh from the beach, I went to my Child Development class. A tall guy with skyblue eyes and golden curls like Roger Daltry got up from somewhere in the back to take the seat beside me. He smiled and wanted me to know, in his bold and cocky way, that he had indeed gotten up so as to take the seat beside me. We'll call him Darby. That very moment, I entertained the radical idea that perhaps a fish might indeed have some use for a bicycle ...
�
�
