Diary of a mothering worker. May 17, 2012

Post 58.

The other morning, as soon as she opened her eyes, Ziya turned over and started to tickle me. It was a baby kind of tickle, more of making the sound of it than the actions, and even then it was barely a tickle at all. Still, I had to curl up and do my best impression that I was being actually tickled by someone who knew how to do it. I didn’t even know that she could, and she couldn’t really, but who knew that one day she would.  

It seemed so sudden, that move from tiny newborn to little person now reflecting back what I didn’t even know she was observing the whole time.  They’ll wake up and suddenly you realise they are older, smarter, more independent and assertive, more ready to take charge of their interactions with you. Ziya’s first instinct to play, be funny and make me laugh that morning was more glorious than the rising sun and it made me smile for many days after. It also made me appreciate how careful and attentive I need to be about who I am and how I am in my interactions with her. I’ve come to realise that exactly what I give to her, she will give back to me.

Less glorious were two other moments that brought this home.  One time, she was sitting in her chair having a meal, and like many babies when they get fed up, she started throwing food on the floor. I tapped her on the wrist, the kind of tap that seemingly all West Indians instinctively resort to when children are giving trouble. It didn’t hurt, in fact she thought I was making a joke, but it didn’t stop her from instantly tapping me back on my wrist and saying to me, “beat!”

Shocked, I looked at her, just over one year old, perfectly able to distill and articulate the essence and sentiment of my action. And, worse, to enact it back to me.  I sat in front of her, suddenly seeing through her eyes all the things I say and do, and feeling overwhelmed at the power and responsibility I hold for what she learns.  Most respectable Caribbean parents would have immediately hit her back and raised their voice to bark, “Don’t hit Mummy!”, thinking without irony that we were instilling respect, authority, discipline and obedience, and not fear, violence, hierarchy and hypocrisy. I decided that unless it was okay for Ziya to hit me, it wasn’t okay if I hit her. I couldn’t tell her not to hit me or other kids (as kids do) in words, I had to teach by example. This is going to sit all wrong with those who believe in licks as a method of teaching discipline, but I got the message. Ziya will reflect to me who I am to her. The challenge is really mine to learn how to love and teach her with that in mind.

As if I needed another reminder, during a hectic moment last night, while changing her dirty pamper and trying to keep her lying flat, I said to her, “just now Ziya!” in what I didn’t realise were harsh tones. Again, she didn’t miss a beat. “Just now!” she expertly imitated, with the exact rushed, gruffness I had just used. I could have cried. I didn’t even realise that was what she heard and experienced. I knew I certainly wouldn’t want her now or as an adult to use that tone with me, even if it was a hectic moment. I’d be hurt even if I knew she didn’t mean it. I’d think, we don’t have to talk to each other like this Ziya, whatever we have to say, we can say it nicely, even gently, to each other. Yet, here I was teaching her something else.

Being nice to Ziya is something I’m committed to. It’s something I think she deserves, after all she didn’t ask to be here and, like all of us, she has her fragilities and her feelings, and she just wants to be loved. It’s something I have to be conscious of though, through the scrambling to and from work, the hustling through errands and mealtimes, and through grinding, cumulative exhaustion. Yet, I find myself realising just how conscious I have to be again and again.  Without being conscious of it herself, she’s telling – no, showing – me this lesson. I realise too, sometimes, that I may learn more from her than she from me. For both of us, it’s a precious opportunity.

These momentous trivialities make me think about all the Caribbean children who have had adults bawl them out or quarrel with them or put them down or just be casually, carelessly insensitive again and again and again for their whole lives. Imagine what they have observed about how they can be spoken to and treated, imagine what they may give back to those adults or to others they love someday. Even worse are the many children who get beaten my parents, teachers and others schooled in the old-style discipline that makes for a long Caribbean tradition of stories of running from a broom or pot-spoon. Maybe those children learned discipline and respect, but imagine what else they learned. And, when we look at the everyday violence in our families and communities, in our words and in our relations, we can see what else is reflected there.

As with all children, the challenge is to find a way to set boundaries and establish ground rules that will enable them to learn how to be healthy, cooperative, loving, non-violent, thoughtful and fair in their relations with others, accepting that like us they are not perfect, they do foolishness and they will make mistakes. The challenge for me, however, is to find a way to be the person I want Ziya to be because one day she might wake up and, like the tickling, I won’t even know when she learned what she knows or when grew up enough to be like that with me.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. May 7, 2012

Post 57.

In my work, I read about it all the time. Women go into politics less than men, and do less well, because of their unequal family responsibilities. Women’s careers bear the cost of these responsibilities, in terms of both their choice of job and their ability to advance there. Women struggle to fulfill their roles at work while also putting out more labour hours than men at home. It’s the story of many women who work, virtually everywhere in the world, both in the past and now.

It’s one thing to read about it and another to negotiate it. People, not just partners, expect women to put their children first, regardless of the cost to their careers, as if women don’t have an equal right to do well in their job while also having a family. I swear, men can both put in the time necessary and count on someone else handling it at home so that they can do better for themselves and as breadwinners.

Do men have the career-family conflicts and dilemmas so often experienced by women? Do men go into parenthood expecting to do an unequal amount of child or family care in addition to their full time jobs? Do men in vast numbers decide that their careers are just going to have to suffer for a few years because they’ve become new dads? Do they choose careers that would allow them to work, father and stay sane?

There might be some out there, but they simply don’t match the numbers of women globally. Of course, paternity provisions that allow men to take time from work without loss of pay or status would make a huge difference. So would making the work of caring not seem like a detraction from the real, paid work of the public sphere…you know, something you can’t put on your CV.

Yet, women do this everyday. They leave jobs to care for children. They take leave without pay and a personal cut to their economic autonomy and power. They up the labour hours they spend on reproductive work, despite the fact that they can’t put that on their CV. They do it because women have, largely, always recognised the value of work for family and they’ve continued to prize the joy of caring. But, they also do it because parents, in-laws, partners, friends and strangers on the street think that extra labour and those personal costs are ‘naturally’ theirs and not men’s to bear.

People have told me that women are naturally meant to spend the first years with their children. Whether that is true or not is up for debate. What’s obvious is that this ‘natural’ addition to their labour is almost completely unrecognised by workplaces and the state, who provide 14 weeks – not years – of subsidized maternity leave. So for years, it’s up to women to manage both their desires and right to work outside of the home, and the popular conception that their rightful work is actually in the home. Any dudes out there going through this too?

Somehow, women have to also account for the sacrifices their families make for their careers. Doing what you have to do, and what you used to do before family in order to do well seems like a luxury, something to be grateful for, because really it’s not something that should be expected, without guilt, as a right. Relationships and parenting are a negotiation, but how many dudes make decisions about their work duties in relation to their partner’s permission. Or their sense that if they are not there at home with the kids, they are lucky that someone is willing to fill in for and stick by them. Yet, people of all walks of life invest in these ideas.

Somehow, few people are as invested in what this means for women across classes, careers, family types and size, aspirations, ethnicity, religion and nationality. If women’s inequality, precisely because of their double burden, doesn’t appear on the horizon to you early, you can’t miss it once you have a baby or a friend, colleague or sibling has a baby. Suddenly, you see it everywhere.

With the social expectation that women must naturally, expertly and effortlessly combine their career aspirations with unequal responsibility for family, while still looking good, we are being set up to fail, even if its only in terms of properly looking after ourselves. Women do it of course. They get up at 5am to cook. They fold clothes at night. They hustle from work to hustle to take their children home to hustle to get to their class on time at UWI. Somehow, they still make it to the gym, the hairdresser as well as to church or to their community group or PTA meeting. Some men might do it too, but doubtlessly this is a women’s reality for many – even educated women, empowered women, feminist women.

If women are ‘naturally’ meant to unequally labour for their families, the entire economy should be organised around a valuing of and support for that. Otherwise, who loses? If mass numbers of women take up this responsibility although it is not ‘naturally’ theirs, this too should be seen as a social and socialisation issue, not an individual experience. Otherwise, what about women’s collective experience will remain unrecognised and invalidated? If women have to negotiate with men around these issues, how can they best be supported? And, what does a lack of real institutional, societal and structural support say about the naturalisation and acceptance of women’s inequality?

Women, with or without children, have equal right as men to work and a career. Women with both full-time jobs and children have a right to equal labour hours as men, whether in or out of the home. Women who become unequally responsible have a right to have that additional labour valued with societal and institutional support. Anything less withholds rather than shares care – and I mean care for women – and is simply not fair.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. May 2, 2012

Post 56.

Marriage is hard. Even good marriages, happy marriages, peaceful marriages. You don’t always agree and yet you can only move forward together. What’s hard is figuring out the balance between protecting yourself and protecting the relationship. It’s this way for all relationships really, not just marriages, not just straight partnerships, not even just amongst couples. That old dilemma of knowing how and where to set boundaries, which of course requires you to know yourself; what you will let go and what you insist upon, what makes you feel good or sad, what you’ve decided your priorities are regardless of the costs, and what you want most from those who love you and whom you love.

The dilemmas are not just about knowing the boundaries that you consider non-negotiable, but knowing how to set them in a way that produces the give and take that you need to live with and love someone else day in and out. Love is hard. Even strong love, lasting love, committed love.

As with most partnerships, children bring complications as much as they bring joy. Children really test the stances you agree on and the differences between your ideas of family, care, discipline and sacrifice. They add extra work and demand extra time, all of which brings new negotiations. They compel parents to take the implicit and honestly interrogate it as gently as they can to see what’s actually there, what’s actually shared, what’s actually possible. So many things that were easy or didn’t need planning or could happen without full communication have changed, and every path is a two way street that presents choices about the direction the whole family will go. And, this is the crux of the whole thing. Either you choose a direction together or everyone eventually goes their own way.

I’m so tired these days that when a young colleague asked me if I was happy, I didn’t have an answer. I was actually too tired to connect to my own emotions. I wonder how women manage to (stereotypically) be “more emotional”, that is connected to their feelings, than men when so often we are giving our all on all fronts, putting in more labour hours, doing more of the care work, and often still helping somehow to help patch up and heal the world. That “more emotional” state has got to be some kind of achievement because emotions are the most pure register we have for knowing when things don’t feel right and, when all the work that’s been put in has been worth it, and they do.

For me, at the centre of surviving the demands of work and family is emotional connectedness, without which we would drift like constellations, connected to each other, but far apart in separate orbits in the sky. I’ve come home every evening these past weeks and turned exhausted eyes to the evening moon, watched that bright star right below, and felt that it seems so simple for them, with their set paths and measured distance and similarly celestial light. But really, their silent sharpness is deceptive. Stars are living intense, fiery lives just like us. Just so, life is full of intensity through which we continue on our own and on our shared path as celestial beings.

So I try to make sure I’m emotionally present as I can and as partnership and parenting needs me to be. I’m trying to connect to both the joy and the commitment of making it work despite lack of sleep, lack of time and lack of more to give. Having Ziya is an unparalleled gift and she makes me realize that what could be assumed or ignored or deferred before, needs to be dealt with now in myself and in all my relationships however hard that turns out to be. Like all children, she can make her parents our best selves together, but only if we know that caring, cooperation and connectedness are an achievement. Especially caring that nurtures communication, patience and a fierce sense of protection for marriage and love as valuable, just because they can make each of us shine, separately and together.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. April 21, 2012.

Post 55.

Chatting outside of class at the end of the semester, a student asked me if I’d post an example answer for the exam to help him study. I told him I was really busy, but I’d see. He responded that instead of gossiping in the night, I could make the time to do it. Gossiping? I get home at 7pm, feed my child and breastfeed. I fold clothes and answer emails for major research projects, I take notes from books I’m reading. I wash dishes, pack lunch, write my diary and plan for my child’s future.

Obviously, he was joking and I knew that, but we not bredren, we doh lime and we wasn’t throwing block talk on no corner. Women are being tested when forced to confront sexism. Unapologetic feminists, like myself, are always being watched in these moments: Can we, above all, take a joke whatever its message? Do we quickly resort to anger, fulfilling nothing but the most predictable idea of who we are? Are we articulate enough to explain what our problem is, to not become emotional, to adopt a cool pose in the face of such violence?

This student’s comment was not only his small way of rebalancing the scales between us, it was also a moment to test my truth in the face of a male privilege he could draw on without trying. In the time I’ve been teaching, I’ve come to learn that students will tell you the most unexpectedly sexist or homophobic things, things that make you wonder if you’ve been in the same course with them, even at the end of twelve weeks in a gender studies class. That’s not ideal, but it’s life. Learning is a process, consciousness-raising takes time, everyone is walking their own path, and each of us has to choose our solidarities for ourselves. I just took a breath and let it slide.

This second year, Jamaican student was bright, critically-minded and I liked him. Like many of the men I teach in Gender Studies, especially in Men and Masculinities classes, he’s working through discomfort with the material and with me, a woman, as his teacher. Some students prefer that men less qualified than me teach what I do. I’m guessing because they think men will be less biased, which is based on the assumption that women are completely biased when it comes to men and not vice versa as well as the idea that women best understand women, but men can understand everybody. It’s also based on the fact that men are seen as being authority figures in a way women are not, even if they know less about a field of study. Go figure.

Still, I’ve had male students come back years later and say that, though they were uncomfortable with feminist critiques of patriarchy in class, later on when starting their football group they refused to agree to female cheerleaders. Either women were equal sports-players or they weren’t, but they were not going to support the men from the side. And, usually, by the end of a course students have a more nuanced understanding of how ideas about women and men work unnoticeably, and they are questioning assumptions they came in with about the course material, about feminism, about gender,and about me.

Yet, there are always surprises. This young man’s comment was one. Another student waiting to speak to me was so offended, she insisted he apologise. I watched the scene between them play out and listened to his apology, delivered with a laugh like he was still joking. Why don’t you go over to the male Head of the Math Department, I suggested, and make the same joke with him and come back and tell me if he finds it funny. He said he had made a joke with a male lecturer before about all the time he spent in the gym. Well, that’s not what he said to me. He said I was home ‘gossiping’. This was something he would never dream of saying to a male lecturer as a joke. He’d know it wouldn’t be considered funny, it would be risky, and it would seem like disrespect. He acknowledged this as we stood there. So, why feel he could do it with me?

There’s an important lesson here for all the women struggling to advance in education and employment. It doesn’t matter how much schooling you have. It doesn’t matter how much institutional power you bring. It doesn’t matter what kind of position of power you occupy. We live in a patriarchal world where students such as this one can draw on the rich historical authority of stereotypes and prejudices to trivialise and belittle you, simply because you are not a man. We live in a world where women face comments and views men never will, on the streets, in our homes, at our jobs despite our education, job titles or institutional position. There is nothing we can do to individually earn this respect, this freedom, which comes to men without them trying. It can only come from creating a world where those demeaning preconceptions are not available. Where they are available, they must carry no sense of right to define how women can be spoken to and spoken about.

There’s an important lesson here too for all those folks who think that women have won, that women and men are treated equally all the time everywhere, that women have everything they could want and that sexism is a thing of the past. It’s not. It’s present, it’s powerful, it comes in skin teeth and straight talk, it comes behind your back and to your face. As little difference as I clearly make in twelve weeks, my work in this world is to ensure that one day, for some young woman, mother or worker like me, it does not come at all.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. April 9, 2012

Post 54.

As a working mom there’s only one thing I’m really proud of. That’s the amount of time that Ziya has spent in rivers and seas. She could run with de best, including children growing up in Cedros and Nariva, when it comes to communing with the waters of the earth.

For a little person, just 16 months, Zi has swam in Balandra coast waters twice, she’s been to Avocat waterfall, twice she’s soaked in the blissful waters of Yara River, twice she’s dipped in the springs of Las Hermanas Estate, she’s been to Paragon Beach, she’s had her Tobago sea bath, and she’s practically grown up on Maracas. The girl knows her water goddesses intimately.

I’m proud of this because I it takes extra effort and commitment, but its important to me that she appreciate what’s truly gorgeous and inalienable about our Republic. I want her to have her green days by the river, I want her to know the names of our trees and rivers as if they are the spirits that people her dreams at night, I want her to know that the earth is the cathedral of every religion, and that it is giving, fragile and sacred. I want her to know the sound of the wind off the sea and its breath through the corridors of trees that shade a stream. I want her to want to stop to listen to birds. I want her to be unafraid of insects, bats, spiders, lizards, snakes, frogs and everything else that is part of our ecosystem, and to which we can be callous and inhumane. I want her to both respect forests and be able to walk in them feeling at home.

That I’ve been doing okay so far makes me feel good for a number of reasons. First, I hate driving, and rivers and seas are usually far enough away that I have to psyche myself up for the drive from the night before.

Second, I’m really really really tired and doing as little as possible on a weekend (in addition to the four baby meals and three baby baths per day, laundry and tidying) is my prized joy. I’d go on a honeymoon by myself and do nothing but sleep if I could, I’m so wrecked by 16 months of Zi not sleeping in the night. Exhaustion, plus a basic desire to not leave my home once I’m there, combine to make me a functioning zombie on the weekend, capping out virtually mid-way through a book with Zi, and unable to find the will to travel beyond the front gate.

Third, there’s lots of other things that good mothers do that I don’t do. I’m not saying I’m bad at the other stuff. It’s just that, on a weekend when Zi is with me, I’m not doing the colouring, spelling, word/picture recognition, building-blocks, baby puzzles, make-believe, stacking toy, tricycle riding, running around and other activities that one should do as part of stimulating learning. Mostly, I just hang out with her and leave the serious socialisation to her grandmother. I’m just too tired. I feel guilty about it, like a sloth in a room of tiger moms, but I’m too tired for the guilt to translate into much action.

Except when it comes to putting her in my backpack and taking her to the blessed and beautiful waters that weave across and at the edges of our country. Somehow, I’ve just made the effort and made it happen.

On Saturday, Zi, her fairy godmother Auntie Tracy and I drove to Yara River. Zi loved the cold water and was doubtlessly in her element. I just felt good. We stayed until she started to shiver and the tide began to rise, and then we drove home. Of course, to do this trip on Saturday required doing nothing on Friday, Sunday and Monday. Seriously, I think I expended whatever I had in me for the long weekend on just that one trip. I was so spent, I let all kinds of things slide, just handed the baby over to Lyndon to bathe and entertain, left the dishes for him to wash, heaped the unfolded clothes on a chair, didn’t make the bed, and relegated everything else to that place where unnoticed things go, even if I noticed them.

It’s very unlike me to not try to be a superhero/control freak when it comes to the baby, completely OCD when it comes to tidying and putting away folded clothes, and manic about all the things that need cleaning and doing in the house. Even as I am typing, half my brain is feeling out of sorts because of the unfolded clothes and the messy things I haven’t neatened into straight lines.

But, I’m telling myself that it doesn’t matter that I couldn’t do everything this weekend. Maybe (probably!) on other weekends, it will matter. What makes this weekend special is the trip to the river, which is what most counted and what excuses everything else.

I might not feel on top of it all, I might be keenly aware of all the ways I can do better, I might wish I could do more, I might feel like I’ve failed when things are left undone, but this weekend I’m feeling proud anyway. Watching my baby in those waters was pure bliss and whatever it took was worth it. The experiences she has already had and the ones I continue to plan are a gift of knowledge and understanding, and a sense of place that may one day radiate from the mirror in her gaze. This gift is important to me, to the earth, to a next generation and one day I hope it will be important to Zi.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. April 6, 2012

Post 53.

Out on third-anniversary date night, assessing our relationship, Stone and I concluded that basically we had being doing great and that there really wasn’t much we could change. We were doing our best and things would get better once both of us simultaneously got a full nights sleep. I proposed a toast: Here’s to not needing to improve!

But wait. ‘Well, there is one area’, he suggested. ‘We could spend more time together, watch a movie, listen to music like we used to, you know after Zi is in bed on a weekend’. Hmph. ‘This is an improvement?’, I thought. After I deal with all the needs of my job and Ziya’s needs, improvement is now about turning to your needs right after? It’s not that I don’t get it. I miss the weekends of movies, music and hugging up too. It’s just that after she’s down, the only need I can think of is to sleep.

‘We don’t have to do it every weekend, but every other weekend would be an improvement’, he gently pressed. ‘I hear you’, I countered, ‘but on weekends, I feed the baby four times and usually bathe her three times a day. That’s why I’m too tired to look after your needs’ (our needs, he countered back). ‘I hear you’, he said. ‘I’ll take two meals and two baths then, so you’ll be less tired.’

‘Great! I’ll just shoot off an email to you recording this decision, but before we toast to it’, I proposed, ‘wouldn’t it be better if we tried to improve on the time we spent together every weekend’?

‘Every weekend?’, he asked, beginning to sense a trap looming in the recesses of such generosity. ‘Sure’, I went in for the kill, ‘we should be spending time together every weekend so, for that to happen, you can do two meals and two baths every weekend’!

I could see he suddenly began to question the wisdom of starting this conversation. ‘Yep’, I continued, ‘that means two meals and two baths on two days every weekend’.

‘Two days!’ Now he began to plan a retreat that could nonetheless retain some terrain of victory. ‘I only meant the one day we’d be hanging out’.

Not a chance, I was on a roll. ‘But, I’m not heading straight to bed just because of that one day, I’m also conserving energy to do it all again the next day’. For me to have the energy and inclination to stay up late being your girlfriend from twelve years ago, means not having to manage exhaustion from two full days of reproductive work after a whole week in the labour market’.

That led to a whole discussion about whether having a baby was at all worth it if I’m exhausted all the time and I end Saturdays with the exhaustion of Sundays on my mind. But, of course, creating life from nothing but your body is worth it. It’s just that, well, here we are.

So, I announced, a toast! To two meals and two baths both days of every weekend, and then hanging out on evenings after! This of course was nothing like how he saw improvement, but I felt like it was a successfully negotiated conversation. So successful did I feel that I even could throw some crumbs. Okay, I gave in, two meals and two baths on two days every other weekend, and only on one day on the weekend in between, and we hang out on the weekend with the two -day shift, but not the other weekend.

He couldn’t stop laughing. What else does one do in the face of one’s own folly? I couldn’t stop laughing myself. What else does one do in the face of such sweet strategic victory? That made two of us, laughing hysterically with tears rolling down our faces over third anniversary dinner. What else do we do in the face of mutual checkmate?

I guess this is the lived representation of when and how negotiations occur in long-term relationships, the ways moments must be seized to have conversations that need to be had with the kind of emotional good will they need to be had amicably. The skill of familiar poker players that partners bring to those conversations. I tell you, UN Security Council deliberations, don’t bring that kind of sophisticated nuance and engagement to nuclear treaties as parents bring to whose turn it is to change a diaper. Political horse-trading is clearly child’s play next to the thrust and parry of power in long-term love.

A toast! To those romantic heart to hearts over anniversary dinner! A toast! To improving always!

A toast! To weekends missed and still looked forward to!….though perhaps for different reasons.

Happy anniversary husband!
hehheheheh!

 

Diary of a mothering worker. April 5, 2012

Post 52.

Last night, I got ready for my third wedding anniversary date with my husband as a stunning almost-full moon rose over the Santa Cruz hills. I was, of course, jealous that the moon could look so celestially heavenly with so little effort. Meanwhile, my non-luminescent, just-battled-traffic-on-the-road self was trying to make the best of a dire mothering-worker what-not-to-wear situation.

Naturally, I was in need of a haircut and my hair looked like those commercials for shampoo and conditioner in the clips before the model gets shampooed and conditioned. I opted for these hot rollers that my mom gave me, hoping that they wouldn’t make me look like I was inadvertently (or worse purposely) rocking big 80s hair or, alternatively, trying to look like my mother (not that looking like her is bad, she’s actually way more glam than me, it’s just that who wants to go on a date with their man looking like their mom?). Of course I had a mustache, because I didn’t have any time to go to wax and my salon lady was short-staffed because her waxing person was pregnant and home feeling ill, but I figure marriage is about for better or worse, through mustache and waxed, and in sickness and health, right?

Moving down, I realized that I had no appropriate wedding anniversary-date going out clothes. This was for many reasons: a) I go to work, I go home to my child, sometimes I go Maracas. I don’t go out, ergo I don’t notice when I don’t have going out clothes; b) in the two years comprising being pregnant, giving birth, breast-feeding and being back at work, I’ve changed sizes multiple times and have given up getting new clothes until my body makes final decisions about which parts have grown, shrunk and shifted; c) I don’t have time or energy to shop, except for rushing to get pampers at Pennywise; and d) I’m not really a shopper and usually am most comfortable in grungy jeans or barefoot by a river.

So, I stared into the dark night of my closet, feeling the least hottest one could before going on a date. People may think going on a date with some stranger or new person is pressure. Nuh uh. Going on a date with the person you’ve been with for twelve years is pressure. You want them to look at you as they did twelve years ago (when you really felt tsss! hot), you want them to remember why they thought you were hotter than the rest, you want to be checked out, looked up and down, dog-pant wanted, despite the fact that they’ve seen you push a placenta out your vagina (which is powerful, but not sexy), they’ve seen you look like Mac from hell put together your exhausted morning face, they’ve seen your breasts point in decidedly different directions than they used to, and you have a mustache.

I’m good in crisis though. First, I figure the least you can do in these keep-the-spark-alive situations is wear a sexy panty. Now, my man isn’t into lingerie, which I happen to love and find very cool about him (he just likes “natural skin” which I think is great, free and one size fits all my sizes), but no hetero, happily married man is going to be unimpressed with the effort of donning some black lace pulled from the back of the drawer. And, I still got some swag in my back pocket (that place where politicians keep election dates). So, I began crisis management from there.

Somehow, I found a top bought in London before I got pregnant and never wore – and it kinda matched what husband was wearing too, which, you know, felt sorta cute. But, then I remembered I never wore it because, among other reasons, I never had – and still don’t have – the right, strapless bra. Bras are over-rated in my mind and I hardly used to use them (and didn’t have to, kaching baby!), but things have changed and there are just some outfits I can’t al fresco my way through anymore. Plus, strapless bras have never worked for me and I don’t know how they do for other women. Don’t they just slide down? Is it only me? Is it possible to have a PhD and still not know how to wear a bra? Clearly. That said, of course I haven’t gone bra shopping to outfit myself for my new conditions. See a), b), c) and d) above.

Breathe. Okay. I’ve got hot rollers. Check. The kind of underwear he’ll want to take off. Check. I rig up a bra-esque something. Check. I got jeans that fit. Well. They kind of fit, but I could really do with a belt. Yep, no belt works with the top, which I’ve finally got to work with the bra, which I’ve done the work to basically invent.

Breathe. Okay. Skip the belt and just keep one hand pulling up the hook of the pants. Pretend strategy isn’t obvious. Find shoes to match. Ah shoes…Now, I’m not a strapless bra kinda girl and I’m not a high heels kinda girl, just like I’m not a Chinese foot binding kinda girl – which is how I think of high heels. I don’t need shoes to feel empowered, I need them to feel comfortable. So, you know I have four pairs of sneakers I basically wear, and who want dress code have to jes dress back. But, sometimes, I wish I had the gear to just get into a good look and out of the house without an over-the-phone session with a therapist.

Breathe. Okay. Find shoes that work with the hair/top/bra/panty. Start to feel arrright! Husband comes in, sees the rollers. Asks ‘if all dat is necessary’ as ‘we jes going out’. Bless his blurry-glasses self, he thought my hair was already perfectly fine. Wonder if it’s better that he didn’t notice I was in a mess or doesn’t care.

Take out rollers, fluff hair. Look like younger, less glam version of mother. Accept the inevitable. Decide its time to go and I look good enough to focus on the fact of love, the moment of togetherness, the importance of what’s on the inside of each other and the relationship, and the cosmic radiance of an almost full moon on a rare, date night.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. March 28, 2012

Post 51.

I had the most amazing meeting today. I was in a room with Ziya and seven grandmothers, just watching these amazing foremothers and forerunners lay the groundwork for generations of women who will come after them. We were meeting about the establishment of a National Commission on Women and, as usual, the discussion was all about strategy, next steps and the way forward. But what was amazing was being amidst the power in that room, experienced, capable, caring, fearless, skilled and hardworking women who were talking about their vision and how to make it happen. What an absolute privilege to be part of their history.

I was a little nervous about having Zi with me. Normally, she’s the bestest baby when she’s out. I could boast about this because when she misbehaves, it’s usually at home. She’s done more meetings that most 16 month-olds as well so I feel pretty confident about having her on the inside. Plus, she’s addicted to ‘boobs’ and easily zens out once she starts to breastfeed. So, once I breastfeed any and everywhere I need to, she handles being out and about like a pro. I fear the day (or night) I stop breastfeeding and don’t have the easiest solution to fussing at my fingertips.

Still, she wasn’t properly combed, I had broken my glasses and I was late for a meeting with the PM. Trying not to rush down the highway, I just hoped things would go smoothly. It’s one thing to have your baby at a meeting at Parliament, it’s another to arrive late with your baby, and it’s entirely something else if your baby decides to throw a tantrum for any reason. My mother had warned me that there might be a possible stinky pamper on the way too. Great.

Still, given the logistics of baby-sitting, and driving East to West and back again, this was the best option. So, mothering worker that I am, I put my child in some red shoes and put all my resources to work at managing to both pay attention to the discussion and to keeping Zi calm.

And it was okay. In fact, it was great. Before the Prime Minister came in, I listened to Minister Auntie Verna talk about how much she would love to spend all her time caring, feeding and spoiling her grandchildren, except there is the people’s work to do. The youth policy, the gender policy, the change to the marriage acts and more. At the last meeting, Jacquie Burgess had talked about how much her own grandson loved to spend the night. Brenda Gopeesingh, Hazel Brown, Ramona, Yvonne Bob Smith, Lisa Ghany – who first appeared a bit scandalised that against all proper protocol I had waltzed in with Zi and who later showed me little 10 month Leah who sleeps from 9pm to 7am(!) – and even the PM who reminded me so much of my mother when, beaming, she talked about the rejuvinating joy of spending time with her grandson. It’s then that I looked around the room and realised that all the women there were a generation before me. They were all that unmatchably wise kind of ancestor called grandmother. They also ran companies, ministries, women’s movements, NGOS and the nation.

While I held my breath throughout the meeting, just thankful that Zi was happy to quietly sit on my lap and scribble all over my notebook – and of course breastfeed in between – I also realised that all these women would have known exactly the challenge of juggling work and children. They would totally understand not only why I might have had to have Zi with me, but also why it should be okay to do so. We were doing work for women, work with women, and we all knew that the working world had to change to accomodate the ways that women do the work they have to, that is both the work of mothering and the work of movements, institutions, legislative agendas, policies, research, social protections and empowerment.

I felt so safe in that moment, so unselfconscious in a way I never would have – even as an unapologetic feminist – in a meeting of older men, unless they were the kind of men who wouldn’t blink an eye at the idea of taking your toddler with you to the boardroom. Those men are definitely out there, but I was nonetheless so thankful that women have broken the glass ceilings that they have, and can totally transform the expectations and assumptions of a space like Parliament without any of them needing to articulate this in words. I thought of the day when Parliamentarians could debate and breastfeed in the House or keep an eye on their grandchildren in a creche in a nearby room, in the same way that women for milennia have had their children and grandchildren with them while they do their work.

And, just as the meeting began with talk about mothering and grandmothering, so after the down-to-business stuff was done, conversation returned to extending maternity leave, the PM talking about having to study for law exams while her son cried and knowing through her own tears that she had to excel. Hazel heading to her car ever mindful of the first Shouter Baptist school about to open, and the lack of a safe and proper crossing for the children.

I never imagined I’d breastfeed through a meeting with the first woman PM while sitting next to tireless and history-making second wave African and Indian women’s activists as I participated and learned from just listening. I felt so lucky to somehow have ended up there. I looked down at Zi and wondered whether at my age she would ever have these moments of witnessing such women in action, not just on upper floors of high rise buildings, but wherever these women are. I hope she does. These meetings seem mundance but they inspire, and she’s been with me, learning from such women before she even realises that’s what is going on.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. March 25, 2012

Post 50.

I suppose that what worries me is how much I make and how little it buys. It makes me wonder how anyone else out there does it. I worry about the costs of having two children instead of one and marvel at those people who have three or four without seeming to grow a gray hair over it. I worry about where my family will end up living given where we can afford to buy, which is virtually nowhere. I worry about what might happen the day something happens and my musician husband or I alone have to manage. I guess I wonder how come others don’t worry too. But then I read the papers and it’s obvious that many do.

In the last few years, the cost of food has inflated from anywhere between 10% and 50% depending on whether you are talking about fish, vegetables, fruit or chicken, and my salary has stayed the same. My new found approach to getting my act together about tenure, really since Ziya, is also about moving up in payscale. Housing went from possible to not. I’m willing to work hard to earn more, and now I feel I really have to.

I live frugally as it is, and have a sneaking suspicion that both those more wealthy and more poor than me invest more than I do in things from looks to drinks, phones to cars, nailpolish to fete tickets. I’ve seen people who earn far less than me insist on drinking Johnny Walker and walk around with $1700 phones. I’m not sure that I can do much different in the basic living department short of becoming a monk or a mountaineering hermit, and neither can Stone. We both indulge in extra things sometimes, but not much. We are two hard-working, carefully-spending people who still barely meet our financial goals. We make more money than many, but are still likely to not be able to get – or afford – a mortgage. Ironic huh?

I used to think I’d inherit this beautiful house where we live, then I grew up a bit and recognised I’d have to earn it like everything else. Everyday we think about how little we can afford it and wonder where we will go. I don’t have the benefit of living at home and having parental support, that pendulum has shifted now as it does for us all at some time and its now my responsibility to provide as much as I can. Then there is Ziya who probably won’t forgive me if I invoice her in 18 years for something that will probably add up to close to a million dollar bill. For all I know, she’ll still be at home living off of the groceries we buy and she’ll arch her eyebrow at my invoice and go off laughing while eating the lunch I’m still lovingly making for her.

Sometimes I wonder if my parents worried the same way, though surely they did even if I never really saw it then. But, thinking again, I was always aware of my mom as a single mother and I always worried about money. She was a top dresser, but somehow I would refuse to shop and become unbearable in response to my sense of the limits of her earnings. To this day, I don’t know how people spend money on shoes, belts, make up and the works, and not worry about their spending priorities. My dad and mom, for all the poverty they both grew up with, liked to spend on things they liked to spend on. My mom liked to look good and she did it well. My dad bought cars and to this day drives a gold benz. I don’t blame them, I didn’t grow up poor and didn’t do what they did to escape, and I don’t know what dreams they had and earned.

Most times I fantasize about winning the lottery. I know exactly what amounts I’ll need in capital for our parents to live off the interest, I know exactly how much Ziya needs and what age she should get it in order to live as worry-free as a trustafarian. I know exactly how much we’d save, spend and give away. Of course, because I hate losing hard-earned money, even small amounts, I don’t play the lottery. Another irony.

Sometimes I wonder if its worth it to work as hard as I do. It would be so much easier to relax and lime more, to not be so serious about my job, to live with letting so much more slide, to just be mediocre and happy if necessary, to smoke weed and service my husband and, you know, chillax, but I can’t. Somewhere inside I’m banking on the hope that if I work hard enough for what I want, I’ll get it. These days I’m focused on the challenge of getting a house. Life is unpredictable and complex though, and you never know what you will be yours at the end and what was supposed to be yours at the end.

I don’t know how my parents did it – and gave me all I had. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it – but I want to do the same for Ziya. Times like this, when I wonder about how we will ever manage, and whether our dreams are unrealistic, I can only shake my head at how desperate it must be for so many other women, mothers and workers out there. This adult stuff can be really tough.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. Sunday 18 March 2012

Post 49.

This week I felt like a superstar.

I launched my first big research project this week, worth over a million TT, and full of exciting stuff I’ve been planning for months. I’ve got an amazing project coordinator so I’m not doing it by myself and the help that I get is just what I need. Despite a thousand small things going wrong – or not quite as I wanted or planned – if I looked at the fundamental things that had to happen, I can say that they all did and they all went as well as they could. My senior advisors were happy, my funder was happy, my project coordinator was happy, my boss was happy and I was happy.

I’m feeling good because I feel like I’m just at that stage of my career when I have enough experience to know how to envision things and logistically see them through. I’m past the junior years, but just at the opening of my senior ones in my field, and I feel knowledgeable, powerful, capable, confident, well-mentored and trained by the absolute best. It’s a wonderful place to be, one I’ve worked hard to get at after 20 years in the women’s movement, 17 years in my department since joining as a graduate student and after 14 years of university. I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way at this age. I think it’s probably pretty common. Many folks spend the years from their early twenties working here and there at the things they are interested in and by the time a decade or more has gone by, there is no way not to have gathered some good skills. I still feel like I’m in my twenties (which is soooo 30s and 40s to say!), but when I realize I’m teaching students born when I was already in university, I know I’m not a yout anymore. So, what’s left but to appreciate the experience that all this time has brought.

Of course, this project is total added pressure, but once I don’t overstep myself (which is hard to pre-determine), my ambition kicks in under high expectations. I’m lucky to have been where I was when this project came up and I feel, as I often do, that I’m exactly where I am supposed to be, ups and downs and all. Naturally, right behind me is a network of support I thank the universe for daily. My mom kept Zi an extra day and when I drop her off there I know she’s in the best possible hands, my helper put in many extra hours – all with generosity of spirit and her smile, my husband took extra shifts to enable me to be out late nights and early mornings, my friends checked in to see how I was. I could have achieved none of this without them. Here too I feel simply lucky.

Zi decided to grow two new teeth this very week to add to the twelve (!) she already has, therefore got up anywhere between four and six times a night every single night, and spent hours sleeping on top of and attached to me. When I crawled out of bed like the walking dead to start the day, somehow I managed to do it without being grumpy, with my brain working in full gear and with me even wearing ironed clothes. How I did it, I still don’t know. I’m the girl who needed nine hours sleep to function. Now, I practically never get more than three continuously. I am too exhausted to do half the things I want to, like go to the opening of the Common sense Convois at a panyard in Tunapuna or do a 5k walk with the Ministry of Gender around the savannah or just drive to Maracas – things that are totally fun in my mind but impossible next to the option of staying home and lying about all day today. Anyway, what matters is that somehow, like most mothers, I just got on and did it. About this I felt good too and somewhat rewarded when, on Friday night, after I was near collapse at the end of a hard week, Ziya slept right through from 9 to 4.30am. Bless her little alligator self.

These past months, I’ve been stressing endlessly about how far behind I am on my publishing – and I still am. Don’t even ask about that paper I had for the professor, due two weeks ago. I’ve not even written to him in shame to say its not ready yet. I’ve also been constantly alert to the fact that neither Stone nor Zi get enough time with me. I know that both miss me and I’m scared I turn into one of those partners and moms who is always at work or working, always tired or pre-occupied and not as fun as I really can be. I still feel this way. And, as usual, I still stress about not getting myself to one thing or another in the women’s movement. But just for today, those sentiments feel far away.

Today, I’m just feeling good. I had the nicest ten minutes tonight with Zi, right before bed. We quietly read three books together and then she turned around and spontaneously gave me a kiss, then a few minutes later she decided she was in a big hurry to go look for her dada and it was all over. Still, if a choir of angels were going to leap out of the cupboard and sing, those would have been the right moments.

What more could I have asked for this week, an amazing few days at work that it took months to prepare for, a quiet weekend at home full of those moments that you simply can’t plan, and the sense of the present to appreciate it as it unfolds.

Now I’m off to listen to an album with Stone, something akin to what we used to do for whole days or weekends more than a decade ago when we first met. He’s probably got a good half hour of me ahead, nothing like days or a weekend, but it’s all I got. Monday awaits and I’m not sure this feeling of contentment, satisfaction and accomplishment will survive my entry past the door. I don’t really have any profound thoughts from the perfections and imperfections of this last week. All I am is grateful.