Eat the Damn Cake

I realized something big the other day. It was an epiphany, I think. I mean, it was on that level. The world opened up. I understood reality in completely new terms. I saw the light. It was beautiful.

I don’t think about boys anymore.

That is it. That’s what I realized. It looks so small when I write it. Like it doesn’t really matter. But here’s the thing–

I used to think about boys all the time. Even when I was thinking about something else, I was secretly thinking about boys. As a girl, I was comfortable with the expression “boy crazy.”

When I read old journals, I begin to despise myself. Hundreds of pages describing boys so unremarkable that the memories of them vanish when I try to call them to mind. Boys so pitiful that I grit my teeth, remembering. Boys I met twice. Boys I wish I could repress without a trace. But most of all, boys who didn’t matter. Who didn’t matter to me even then. I tried to make them matter, because I was curious about love. I was fascinated by it. In fact, thinking about boys didn’t even have to involve an actual, live boy. Often it took the form of vague fantasizing about the possibility of love.

(it was hard to find a picture that even remotely related. source)

I was always doing something else. Studying, writing, finishing a project, playing a recital, teaching twelve-year-olds how to sing the prayers, trying frantically to get all A’s in college, applying to grad school, moving to New York City, whatever. My life was full. But I wanted more, so I tugged and squashed and wriggled boys into my schedule. Just in case.

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People like to argue about what’s best for kids. And then they like to tell other people what’s best for kids. For all kids, usually. People have argued for parenting methods as disparate as locking a crying baby in a room by itself, to teach it independence, and literally never putting a baby down, from birth, until, um, it can give birth to its own baby. And they’ve argued these positions passionately, and convinced a lot of other people that if the thing they are arguing for doesn’t happen then the child will grow up to be a blathering, pathetic, hopeless failure who is obsessed with collecting tiny porcelain Disney character figurines.

Have you read the latest piece about parenting? It’s called Why Chinese Mothers are Superior. It is an excerpt from Yale Law professor Amy Chua’s new book, and it was published in the Wall Street Journal, inspiring about 2,500 comments like, “What is WRONG with you?!! I don’t understand why people are so stupid, and you should be ashamed of yourself for writing this, because you are really a terrible person.” But then, as everyone who writes or reads anything on a big site knows, you will find identical comments at the bottom of a piece about why fawns are adorable little animals with sweet round eyes.

Still, we all know this is a cultural hot button. And we all know a lot of people will have a lot to say about this stuff. And we all know I’m going to be one of them. So:

Chua explains that Chinese mothers (and parents from other non-white American cultural groups) think about children differently. They think about potential, rather than protection. They know their kids can accomplish anything, and so they make sure they accomplish everything. No excuses. No play dates. No grades below an A. No TV. She complains that a lot of the (white) parents she knows are constantly worried about their kids. How do they feel? How is their self-esteem? Are they enjoying life enough?

Chua says, you enjoy life later, when you’re accomplished. And at that point, you enjoy it a lot more. In the meantime, she is willing to forbid her little daughter from using the bathroom until she perfects a piano piece. She’s willing to throw away a handmade card from her daughter, because it’s not good enough.

The truth is, well, I can’t completely disagree with Chua.

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My grandmother turned ninety a couple days ago. My mom threw this big party for her, and lots of relatives I haven’t seen in five or more years came. People got up to make little speeches about her, and at the end of every speech she’d add something, like, “Do you also remember when we tried to wallpaper the den?” and the person would remember, and they would both laugh. She was completely comfortable with all the attention. Like someone who has, well, been around other people for ninety years. I was a little jealous.

After the party, my brother said, “I think that’s the first time it’s been all about Grandma.”

I thought about it. It was true.

“It was nice,” he said. “I wonder why that didn’t happen sooner.”

Because Gram has always been the one who is doing something for someone else. It’s that very familiar story about women (which is not to say that it can’t be applied to a whole lot of men) that we tell each other when we talk about families and gender and what we want to be when we grow up. But it’s almost easy to miss when it’s already here, in our families and lives.

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People should talk to each other more. About the things that impact us the most.

About money, for example. It’s taboo. We’re not allowed to tell each other how much  or how little we make. Bear complains about this sometimes. He says it prevents workers from learning how far they can go. If you don’t know that your friend in the same industry in a similar position is making more than you because the two of you feel too awkward to discuss it, then you might not ask for a raise. You might not know you deserve one. Not talking about money makes it mysterious. It gives it more power and emotional significance than it deserves.

We should talk to each other about sex. It seems like no one is really sure what’s normal, and everyone is really curious. Sometimes I talk with another woman about sex, and I realize she doesn’t expect her partner to be giving her a lot of pleasure. I am always shocked. I want to tell her to go and talk to a lot more people, and find out what they think about that. I want to know how many women think it’s OK to be in bed with someone who doesn’t seem interested in making them happy. How many guys feel awkward because they don’t know how to act interested in making their partner happy without looking stupid or inexperienced?

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It was the first day of the new year. I got out a notebook and a pen and told Bear we were going to do New Year’s resolutions. I wrote our names at the top. Under mine, I wrote, “Work out more.”

Bear said, “Win the lottery.” And then, “Don’t write that down! That’s not a real one! Write ‘procrastinate less.'”

Oliver Sacks has a piece in the New York Times about how capable brains are of changing. I didn’t really believe him about the blind boy who could play video games by making clicking sounds that worked like dolphins’ sonar, but when he said something about how everyone’s New Year’s resolution is always, absolutely without fail, to work out more, I felt like he was staring me down through the page (screen. obviously. I haven’t held a physical newspaper since I was about ten). I am everyone. I am totally boring. And my brain will probably never change because of it. I can’t even produce a decent clicking sound.

(tell me your secret!! source)

OK, I’m almost not everyone, because after “work out more,” I wrote, “Feel less guilty.” Which is a tough assignment.

I think that out of all the negative emotions, I am probably best at guilt. I do it prolifically, with the fluency of a natural, and the flair and subtlety of a true artist. I can feel guilty about almost anything. Like not remembering to say goodbye to someone at a party. Or neglecting to email someone back within a day after remembering that they sent me a friendly message last year. I can maintain both short and long term guilt simultaneously: guilt because I haven’t washed the dishes in the sink and guilt because I haven’t learned anything about the stock market yet, which I’ve been meaning to do forever, and which I suspect I’ll never do because if the guilt hasn’t worked so far, when will it? And while I’m feeling guilty about the stock market, I remind myself that, more generally, I don’t know enough about managing money. Which is an incredibly important life skill. And it’s astounding that I’ve made it this far with so little knowledge about it. And there’s a real chance that I won’t make it much farther. And when that happens, I’ll have no one to blame but myself. Who I’m already blaming.

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First of all, I had no idea my piece about nose jobs was going to be on the front page of AOL yesterday. People started texting me, and I didn’t believe them at first. Thank you to everyone who wrote me an email after reading the article! My nose is taking over the world.

“Beauty” is a powerful word. It suggests something selective, exclusive. Something in limited supply. It’s timeless, classic, and eternally cool. Beautiful. Most of us are careful not to accidentally apply it to ourselves. We think we don’t deserve it. Most of us are normal people, after all.  We have attractive moments, of course, and certain successful features. But it takes more than that.

The heroine of the romance novel never has gorgeous hair but also prominent acne. Beauty is supposed to come as a complete package. She has masses of honey colored curls and spotless, taut skin. And in addition to that she has giant, frightened-yet-defiant violet eyes ringed with lashes the size of feather dusters, perky breasts that heave temptingly on command, lavish pink lips, and a pert afterthought of a nose. Her ears are probably adorable, too. Her ankles are slender. You could go up and down that girl’s body with a tape measure, and not one bit of her would be out of proportion. Which is why she’s fictional. And one reason why I don’t read romance novels (another reason has to do with the sex scenes, which make me laugh outloud and then start muttering irritably to myself, “Seriously? Are you kidding me? That’s supposed to be hot? ‘His stiffening need’?”).

Sometimes I see women whose features all work together expertly, effortlessly. And we’re trained to feel sort of sorry for the girl who gets described only as having “nice hair.” It sounds a little like “good personality.” You say it, and then there’s this empty space afterward, that should be filled with all the other things that are nice about her, but isn’t.

Nice hair is awesome. It’s easy to forget that.

(source)

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