Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (38 page)
Read Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) Online
Authors: Anna Quindlen
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My daughter is ready to leap into the world, as though life were chicken soup and she a delighted noodle. The work of Professor Carol Gilligan of Harvard suggests that sometime after the age of eleven this will change, that even this lively little girl will pull
back, shrink, that her constant refrain will become “I don’t know.” Professor Gilligan says the culture sends a message: “Keep quiet and notice the absence of women and say nothing.” A smart thirteen-year-old said to me last week, “Boys don’t like it if you answer too much in class.”
Maybe someday, years from now, my daughter will come home and say, “Mother, at college my professor acted as if my studies were an amusing hobby and at work the man who runs my department puts his hand on my leg and to compete with the man who’s in the running for my promotion who makes more than I do I can’t take time to have a relationship but he has a wife and two children and I’m smarter and it doesn’t make any difference and some guy tried to jump me after our date last night.” And what am I supposed to say to her?
I know?
You’ll get used to it?
No. Today is her second birthday and she has made me see fresh this two-tiered world, a world that, despite all our nonsense about post-feminism, continues to offer less respect and less opportunity for women than it does for men. My friends and I have learned to live with it, but my little girl deserves better. She has given me my anger back, and I intend to use it well.
That is her gift to me today. Some birthday I will return it to her, because she is going to need it.
For Quindlen, Christopher, and Maria Krovatin
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet;
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
—W
ILLIAM
B
UTLER
Y
EATS
AcknowledgmentsIn 1988, when he was deputy publisher and I was preparing to leave
The New York Times
for the last time, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., approached me about the possibility of becoming an Op-Ed-page columnist. He will always have my gratitude for that blessed leap of faith. So will Arthur O. Sulzberger, who made the formal offer, and Jack Rosenthal, who told me in no uncertain terms to take it.
Twice a week the best copy editors in the business vet my work. You don’t see the names of Steve Pickering and Linda Cohn on my column, but their care and attention are in everything good I do.
My colleagues at
The New York Times
are the most generous people—and the finest reporters and editors—I could ever know. Those in the Washington and City Hall bureaus, on the national staff covering social policy and on the metro staff covering social welfare, know how often I have called upon them to share reporting and insight. They have been invaluable sources of information and inspiration.
All my friends have been involved with this column, but three deserve special notice. I owe a good deal to the wit and wisdom of the team of Michael Specter and Alessandra Stanley. And if Janet Maslin didn’t exist, I would have had to invent her, so that I could have someone smart, thoughtful, and funny to talk to every morning on the phone.
Two books in particular have been of great help to me over these last three years, giving me a historical grounding in the work of opinion-column writing. The first, Charles Fisher’s
The Columnists: A Surgical Survey
, was published in 1944. The second, Peter Kurth’s superb biography of Dorothy Thompson,
American Cassandra
, put me in touch with the woman whose work first informed my own. Both were primary sources for the introduction to this book.
For three years Elizabeth Cohen has been much more than my assistant. She has been my surrogate, my protector, and my office voice. This is her book, too. And it also belongs to Amanda Urban, who is a great agent and a better friend, and Kate Medina, who is the best editor in the book business.
Quindlen, Christopher, and Maria Krovatin, my children, have been extraordinarily understanding of how distracted I can be, particularly on what are known around here as column days. And they have consistently provided me with good material—and a sane and balanced view of the world that I would not have had otherwise.
There’s little precedent for a man married to an opinion columnist, since there have been and continue to be too few of us who are female. Sinclair Lewis, when he was married to pundit doyenne Dorothy Thompson used to beg not to have It discussed in his home, It being the world situation or anything else that smacked of the Op-Ed page. My husband, Gerry Krovatin, has instead been unstinting of his opinions on every aspect of It, and uncomplaining if I did not adopt them. And he is responsible for what remains the best line in anything that has appeared with my byline: “Could you get up and get me a beer without writing about it?” I suppose this is the answer.
Loud and Clear
Blessings
A Short Guide to a Happy Life
How Reading Changed My Life
Black and Blue
One True Thing
Object Lessons
Living Out Loud
Thinking Out Loud
BOOKS FOR CHILDREN
The Tree That Came to Stay
Happily Ever After
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A
NNA
Q
UINDLEN
is the bestselling author of four novels (
Blessings, Black and Blue, One True Thing
, and
Object Lessons
) and four nonfiction books (
A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Living Out Loud, Thinking Out Loud
, and
How Reading Changed My Life
). She has also written two children’s books (
The Tree That Came to Stay
and
Happily Ever After
). Her
New York Times
column, “Public and Private,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Her column now appears every other week in
Newsweek
.
Read on for a preview of Anna Quindlen’s new collection of essays
Loud and Clear
Available in hardcover in 2004 from The Random House Publishing Group
A NEW ROOF ON AN OLD HOUSE June 2000
A slate roof is a humbling thing. The one we’re putting on the old farmhouse is Pennsylvania blue black, and it’s meant to last at least a hundred years. Jeff the roof guy showed us the copper nails he’s using to hang it; they’re supposed to last just as long. So will the massive beams upon which the slates rest. “Solid as a cannon-ball,” Jeff says. Looking up at the roof taking shape slate by enduring slate, it is difficult not to think about the fact that by the time it needs to be replaced, we will be long gone.
In this fast food, facelift, no-fault divorce world of ours, the slate roof feels like the closest we will come to eternity. It, and the three children for whom it is really being laid down.
Another Mother’s Day has come and gone as the roofers work away in the pale May sun and the gray May rain. It is a silly holiday, and not for all the reasons people mention most, not because it was socially engineered to benefit card shops, florists, and those who slake the guilt of neglect with once-a-year homage. It is silly because something as fleeting and finite as 24 hours is the antithesis of what it means to mother a child. That is the work of the ages. This is not only because the routine is relentless, the day-in/day-outness of hastily eaten meals, homework help, and heart-to-hearts, things that must be done and done and then done again. It is that
if we stop to think about what we do, really do, we are building for the centuries. We are building character, and tradition, and values, which meander like a river into the distance and out of our sight, but on and on and on.
If any of us engaged in the work of mothering thought much about it as the task of fashioning the fine points of civilization, we would be frozen into immobility by the enormity of the task. It is like writing a novel; if you consider it the creation of a 400-page manuscript, the weight of the rock and the pitch of the hill sometimes seem beyond ken and beyond effort. But if you think of your work as writing sentences — well, a sentence is a manageable thing.
And so is one hour of miniature golf, one tětè-a-tětè under the covers, one car ride with bickering in the backseat, one kiss, one lecture, one Sunday morning in church. One slate laid upon another, and another, and in the end, if you have done the job with care and diligence, you have built a person, reasonably resistant to the rain. More than that, you have helped build the future of her spouse, his children, even their children’s children, for good or for ill.
Joie de vivre
, bitterness, consideration, carelessness: They are as communicable as chicken pox; exposure can lead to infection. People who hit their children often have children who hit their children. Simple and precise as arithmetic, that. “Careful the things you say, children will listen,” sings the mother witch in Stephen Sondheim’s
Intro the
Woods. And listen and listen and listen, until they’ve heard, and learned.
There is a great variety of opinion about mothering because there is great variety in the thing itself. In
Sons and Lovers
, D. H. Lawrence renders Mother an emotional cannibal, trying to consume her children. Mrs. Bennet of
Pride
and
Prejudice
is a foolish auctioneer, seeking the highest bidder for her girls. Mrs. Portnoy hectors, hilariously. It is no coincidence that these are all, in some way, richly unsatisfactory, even terrifying mothers (and that their creators were not mothers themselves). The power of the role creates a powerful will to dismiss, ridicule, demonize, and so break free.
Fat chance, Freudians. Whether querulous or imperious, attentive or overbearing, warm or waspish, surcease or succubus, she is
as central as the sun. During our lifetime motherhood has been trashed as a deadend no-pay career and elevated as a sacred and essential calling. It is neither. It is a way of life, chosen in great ignorance, and the bedrock of much of what we are, and will become.
The flowers sent under the auspices of that gauzy pink second Sunday in May have browned now, and the cards that stood in repose on the mantel have been consigned, with their elder sisters, to the bottom of the jewelry box or the bureau drawer. All this has as much to do with mothering as a blue spruce lopped off at the trunk and strung with glass has to do with the message of Christianity. Mothering consists largely of transcendent scut work, which seems contradictory, which is exactly right. How can you love so much someone who drives you so crazy and makes such constant demands? How can you devote yourself to a vocation in which you are certain to be made peripheral, if not redundant? How can we joyfully embrace the notion that we have ceased to be the center of our own universe?
There is the roof, growing larger and stronger, one small piece after another making a great whole, until it can withstand winds and heat and blizzards and downpours. It is a utilitarian thing, and a majestic one, too. There are ghosts beneath its eaves, ghosts yet to be born, the ghosts of my children’s grown children, saying, “Our grandparents put that roof on the house in the year 2000.” And if I could speak through the opaque curtain of time I would say, “We did it to keep you safe and warm, so that you could do your best by you and yours, just as we have tried to do.” Perhaps I would be talking to myself, because the house had been sold, the roof given over to shelter other people’s children. That’s all right, too. It’s the thought that counts, and the metaphor. In the sharply angled gray lines against the lambent sky I can read reports of my own inevitable passing. But I see my immortality, too, the part of me that will live forever.