Reality Chick

In Backspace’s STET! column, I ask:

Can a Writer NOT Embrace Social Media? 

My name is Christina. I’m a published writer and a blogophobic. I’m also Facebook-averse and Twitter-terrified.

I’m a long form writer, I subscribe to egghead foreign affairs journals and ten thousand words is about the right length for me to read about or explain a complex issue like the financial crisis or the AIG bailout. I used to be a research analyst, author of in-depth executive white papers, and find that the quick take on an issue is usually a dumb take.

I don’t like chatting in public, I’m paranoid about people spying on me and listening in. When I’m on Facebook I feel like I’m stuck in a stalled New York City subway, a crowded elevator, or my high school cafeteria, looking at and listening to things I’d much rather block out.

 There’s a comic I love called Andy Kimler who does a nice riff on what he calls “Fritter.”

 I’m a person who’s always had a very few, tight friends with whom I communicate deeply and at length, and I hate small talk. Small talk and mean talk is what I find on many blogs and some online communities. (Yes, I understand the irony of me saying this online .)

The writers I hold in greatest esteem don’t even have web sites, let alone Twitter their every thought. I tend to lose respect for writers who promote themselves a lot online. If someone’s sending me a Twitter and FB update every day, I think: pathetic. Monthly is fine, but daily or weekly – unless they’re doing something phenomenal like plugging up the BP gusher – looks a bit desperate. 

 I don’t like airing my work and its aims too early – because it changes. It changes every day. Nor do I think it’s useful to share my, or read about another writers’ creative process. It’s a mystery, and I like to keep it that way.  I’d rather get more and better fiction from my favorite writers than an ode to their cat, or a riff on their back garden. I want the magic, not an explanation of how they did the trick.

An essayist and author I great admired — please note the past tense — has fallen on hard times, and blogs her every misery: an ugly divorce, homelessness, bankdruptcy and just plain bad attitude. I wish she didn’t. I wish she could sit on these thoughts while she works some of her problems out, instead of spewing them into the world unprocessed.  I’m not her shrink, I’m her potential audience, a future buyer of her books, if she’d only stop blogging and get back to work.

 That said – does anyone know of any services that could help me with my online promotion? Because as much as I rant about it, I understand that it’s here to stay. 

http://backspacewriters.blogspot.com/2010/07/can-writer-not-embrace-social-media.html

http://backspacewriters.blogspot.com/2010/07/can-writer-not-embrace-social-media.html

This week in Drinking Diaries.com, I write about the bar to end all bars that cured me of  night-clubbing forever — at least in Connecticut.

          Freshman year in college, when Saturday Night Fever came to the tiny, provincial Pennsylvania town of  my small, private, pseudo-elite college, my friends contemptuously declared that no one could possibly look and act like the people in that film. It had to be a gross exaggeration.

They were wrong.

Down the Post Road in Fairfield County, Connecticut, since the age of fourteen I’d frequented a number of “theme” bars that catered to a disco clientele: a place where every table had a telephone, another with tiger-patterned rugs on the walls, a different one that sponsored dance contests.   These discos were full of young men with driven-back hair, polyester shirts and flared designer jeans with contrasting threads and platform shoes; girls with “precision” blow-dry hair cuts, glittering green eye shadow, boob-baring Danskins, and heels hanging off their wooden Candies.  

 Bars came in and out of fashion for mysterious reasons. Good Times Café in Norwalk was located in the bottom half of the back of a strip mall far down the Post Road, at least forty minutes from my home town, but which inexplicably became an instant hit with people from New Haven to Brooklyn, mixing everyone from Bronx street kids to millionaires sons from Greenwich.   

It was expensive, with a two dollar cover and $1.25 bar drinks, and you always had to wait in line, sometimes for hours, to get in. When you did, it was a nightmare of flashing lights, over-made up girls and scary men – the aura of Weimar Berlin with the added trauma of disco music blaring from speakers, or bad metal from a live band.

            I only went because my friends wanted to go, I never actually met anyone I liked there, but I loved to dance. The few times I was persuaded to go out with one of the Tom, Jerry, or Elvises who accosted me, the dates were duds. Men who looked glamorous under the mirror ball turned out to be: policemen, factory workers, rich college boys from Darien who all wanted a real girlfriend.

            I preferred to dance. I was there a minimum of three nights a week, every week, during the summer of 1979, arriving to stand in line as early as 7 p.m., and generally staying until it shut its doors to the strains of  My Sharona at 3.

Good Times wound down sometime in the mid-1980s and its former space is now a fitness club, but it lives on in cumulative memory. Searching in vain for an historical Google image, I came upon  Facebook page titled, “I Partied My Single Life away at Good Times Café in Norwalk, CT.”:

Thursday, 25-cent drinks. Wednesday-male stripper night. Closed Goodtimes and then it was off to Portchester NY to continue. Does anyone remember the X-rated hypnotist?

          Ah, yes, I remember it well.

One commentor’s experience best reflects my own: I was there so much, my parents had my mail forwarded. I remember such great times, and probably forgot even better ones.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=47601104631&v=wall

                                                           www.drinkingdiaries.com/2010/07/19/

http://www.drinkingdiaries.com/2010/07/19/

Therese Borchard struggled with manic depression during her college years, but went on to earn a master’s degree and establish a stellar career in journalism and book publishing.  But the hormonal shifts of motherhood, a geographic move, as well as the switch from sociable on-site office work to an isolated, home-bound freelance life, created a perfect storm of factors for mental illness to burgeon once more.

After a harrowing, months-long stay in an institution, she returned to home and children and went on to become the author of the hit blog, Beyond Blue on Belief.net, where she shares her continuing struggles with anxiety and manic depression, from her own particular Catholic perspective. This year she published her memoir, Beyond Blue: Surviving Depression and Anxiety and Making the Most of Bad Genes, along with The Pocket Therapist: An Emotional Survival Guide, which offers concise techniques to help anyone living with a chronic illness get through the demands of a day.

I interviewed her for Working with Chronic Illness on how she manages to work, raise a family and keep her manic depression under control.

 CG: What are your biggest challenges in navigating your health condition, your job and your home life? 

TB: I suppose my biggest challenge is managing my health in a way that I can concentrate enough to meet my work deadlines. Fortunately, my schedule is flexible enough that I can write extra blog posts on a day where I’m feeling good, and bank them for the days my head isn’t good for anything. But I’m always nervous to commit to a meeting in person, because I don’t know how I will be feeling that day. So I fake it as best I can. I’ve had to do that a lot lately with the publicity efforts for my books: I’ve had to plaster a smile on my face and spit out nice sound bites all the while I am thinking that I wish I were dead.

 What is a typical work day like? 

I drop off the kids at school at 8, and usually work out for an hour. From 10 to 2 are my golden hours, where I try to get the posts written, or follow up on a story I was supposed to write for other magazines and newspapers I write for. If it’s sunny outside, I will take 20 minutes and eat outside, because it’s crucial that I get that sunshine and fresh air. By 2:30 I usually need to pick up the kids, start homework, get organized for lacrosse practice, etc. My work window is fairly small, so I try to get as much done as possible in the hours they are at school. And two days usually go to doctors’ appointments, blood work, and therapy.

What, if any accommodations do you/your employers make for yourself? (I know you have to stop yourself from overwork sometimes!)  

My editor, Holly, is very understanding that things like Twitter tutorials and SEO (search engine optimization) training can sometimes activate my inner energizer bunny that I want at rest. It’s difficult, especially in the blogosphere, not to make my writing my life and tweet all hours of the day. I need boundaries between work and home life. I try my best to shut off my computer when I’m not working, and to leave it closed during the weekend. I find that when I ignore my sensitivity to online chatter, that I will have to invest a lot of time into getting myself well again … so I try to be as prudent as possible. 

 Your blog is about coping with mental illness, so your employers knew of your condition. But your illness is “invisible” — you look super healthy, you run, etc. Did they really know what it entails, how hard it is, that it could ever become overwhelming?    

 That’s a good question. I think Holly is as understanding and empathetic as any editor could be. And the manager editor, Michael Kress, and the editor-in-chief, Ju-Don Roberts, too. They want me to publish the real stuff – like the video where I sobbed and said depression wasn’t always pretty – as that is what best speaks to people in the throes of depression. So if I can’t stay as up on current events or celebrity gossip as some of the other bloggers, they are fine with that. Sometimes I need to write pieces a few weeks in advance, to give myself a little time of rest in a depressive cycle. That’s not a great formula for search engine optimization—as you want to write on all the hottest search terms—but if the content is authentic and resonates with folks, that’s what is important.

 You started out with great qualifications, a masters degree, a magazine career and book publishing. After you had your kids and a breakdown (no connection there!) — you had to rebuild. Can you detail those challenges a bit? How did you negotiate with your prospective employer?

 All I can say is I had to take it in very small steps. I was unable to produce anything for about six months. Every time I sat down to write, it was awful. I would just cry and cry.

 So I relied on my great aunt’s advice to just take it very slow, one step at a time. I first signed up to be a writing tutor at the Naval Academy, because I wanted to see if I could concentrate for three hours a week. Getting through some of those first papers was more challenging than getting my masters degree. But, at the end of that, I had the confidence to ask an editor if I could have back my assignment of bi-weekly columns. Twice a week I had to come up with something coherent on paper. That was quite a challenge, too! But together, the tutoring and bi-weekly column, gave me the self-assurance to pursue “Beyond Blue,” the blog, and then later, “Beyond Blue,” the book.

 Negotiating is VERY hard, especially when you are feeling so unsure of yourself. What I did was to speak with anyone I could who might have information that would help me negotiate. I then pretended I was them … my friends who had just gone through this and came out with favorable working agreements. I told myself that it wasn’t me who would be doing the talking, but my friend, and that somehow made it easier.

 http://workingwithchronicillness.com/2010/06/not-just-surviving-but-thriving-while-living-with-depression/

http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2010/06/working-with-chronic-illness.html

My short memoir on  life at AIG named runner-up in the Manhattan Media Contest. Read it here:

                                    Elegy for an Organization

“In the federal trial, AIG alleges that ousted CEO Maurice ‘Hank’ Greenberg left AIG in 2005 with 290 million shares of illegally seized stock, since sold for an estimated $4.3 billion …” 

I could tell you about AIG.

That I was one of the no-name people, not the elites who screwed up.

That I made $20,000 a year.

That my office was on the narrow crooked end of Wall Street.

Where on the most glorious sunny day, it was dusk out my manager’s window.

That my own office was three mustard-colored walls and one grey, free-standing partition.

I could tell you that I was terrified.

Of the big buildings, the air of mystery, the sub-CIA cowboy culture.

Of the numbers I didn’t understand.

I could tell you that our P.R. policy was Don’t Talk to the Press.

That the building foundations shook when USA Today named our chief, Hank, the  seventh highest-paid CEO in the nation, or was it world?

I could tell you that not only in the company, but all over Wall Street, everyone knew that A.I.G. meant All Is Greenberg.

I could tell you that if Spitzer hadn’t forced Hank out, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

That AIG’s been brain-dead ever since.

I could tell you I have a soft-spot for Hank.

I could tell you that this company was a family when I had none.

The year people died, went mad, out of business, into rehab, into nursing homes.

I could tell you that for years I ignored the half page ads in the Help Wanteds

With the tall letters that said WALL STREET.

That I only answered AIG’s because it didn’t.

That when I learned it was Wall Street and didn’t answer their calls.

That they kept calling.

That my boss at AIG was the first man I worked for who didn’t harass me.

That he was a blue collar New Jersey newsman.

That his staff called him Bambi behind his back.

I could tell you that this was the year the stock market dropped.

That a rising tide lifts all boats, but hurricanes stir up gold.

I could tell you I made the best friends of my life there.

That we drank vodka in the morning but worked through the night.

That AIG’s unofficial motto was “We shall pay no claim before its time.”

That it didn’t need a diversity program, its workers came from over the world.

Its interns from housing projects.

I could tell you we were proud of the sub-CIA cowboy culture.

 That I came to have more respect for financial people than writers.

That the Ivy arts grads I roomed with after college couldn’t hack the real world.

That they left their jobs and lived off their parents.

I could tell you that people on Wall Street don’t take money from their families.

They support them.

That AIG didn’t care about pedigrees.

Just work.

I could tell you that on my floor Jews and Arabs were friends.

            That there was a transsexual, a platinum punk rocker, and a girl with purple hair, (me.)

I could tell you all about the married closet queen and his 400-pound secretary.

I could tell you how I learned to use a personal computer there.

That on the computer cube wall hung the Leviathan company chart.

For internal use only.

A complex web of holding companies, limited partnerships, and wholly-owned subsidiaries.

Chilean pension funds, Indonesian customs bonds anyone?

Four hundred boxes, cross-linked, to outsmart the auditors.

I could tell you that when Hank made a joke people were afraid to laugh.

That his oldest son Jeffrey was overworked.

That his second son Evan looked like a movie star.

That he fired both sons, or they left of their own volition.

And became CEOs elsewhere.

I could tell you that when Hank entered a party, he scattered crowds like a smoke bomb.

That he was five foot six, or looked it.

That he was 60 and looked 40.

That the one time my work brought me within feet of him, he winked.

I could tell you that I remember what I wore that day and what it cost.

That I walked home over the Brooklyn Bridge.

I could tell you that my whole life flowed from that building.

That it split me in two and broke up my home.

That when I worked there, I moved to a seedy hotel.

That AIG was more home than hotel.

That it was both prison and refuge.

I could tell you that I couldn’t afford to leave the hotel till I got a better job.

That I left AIG after 18 months for a $10,000 raise.

That I’d have stayed for $5,000.

I could tell you that I understood why AIG was cheap.

That by the time I left I understood numbers.

About shareholder value.

About managing risk.

I could tell you that AIG wasn’t like other Wall Street Casinos.

I could tell you that once a week Hank went through his rolodex to call someone in.           

And rip his face off.

That I wasn’t important enough for this to ever happen to me.

That the old Chinese waiters were equity millionaires.

That the upper echelons lived in a culture of fear.

            That they worked with Golden Handcuffs.

AKA Deferred Compensation.

AKA Holding on for the Retirement Bonus.

Now the disintegrating company’s news Googles into my inbox, like jagged rocks down an avalanche.

I could tell you that when Spitzer kicked Greenberg out, he parted the golden pot from the people who’d earned it.

Or were promised it.

That none of this was on paper.

All on trust.

I could tell you that most likely the company chart, with its 400 cross-linked boxes, made this perfectly legal.

Is life ever fair?

I could tell you more.

I could tell you all policemen are pigs, all soldiers murderers, all men are rapists and all Wall Street workers evil.

 Or I could tell you that Hank Greenberg gave me a job when no one else would.

That the company saved my life.

Or I could tell you I left my soul back there, locked up in a grey metal desk drawer.

 http://www.nypress.com/article-20328-non-fiction-contest-runner-up-elegy-for-an-organization.html

For the world to listen. The tide is finally turning against the unfettered fertility quest, with the sad public examples of Octo-Mom, and Jon and Kate’s marital nosedive. Finally, last month, in British Cosmo, Cameron Diaz said it: Maybe there’s just too much emphasis on having babies. Maybe if women weren’t under such constant pressure to reproduce — “shunned” was the word she used for the childless — it wouldn’t feel so terrible when it doesn’t happen.

In the British press the single, childless-for-now star has drawn more raves than rants:

The U.K.  Telegraph calls Cameron Diaz  ”the height of responsible citizenship” – for remaining childless. Hear hear!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/5524706/Cameron-Diaz-does-the-decent-thing.html

In this month’s Exhale, I praise the forthright star and give a rave review to Pamela Jeanne Tsigdinos’s new book, Silent Sorority: 

Summer Reading Roundup

 Some Fresh Food for Thought, plus some Old Chestnuts to bite into – try not to break any teeth!  

             In books, as well as in blogs, I often find our friends across the pond speak more realistically about fertility issues than we Americans, with our unfettered optimism. (Babies for everyone! IVF at 90!)

 Beyond Childlessness, Rachel Black, Louise Scull, Rodale Press, 2005

            I have read several books on unintended childlessness, none offered the depth of comfort and shared experience as this one. The authors are two women — one single, one married to a man who forbid a family without making his preferences clear before marriage — who sought out and interviewed other women in their situation, and let them tell their stories themselves.

            This book is head and shoulders above any other “fix the problem” or memoir anthologies on childlessness, because it ventures where others dare not go. Well-meaning books like the husband and wife-authored Sweet Grapes sugarcoat some of the ugly truths. 

 
            Other books on childlessness say “it’s no use going over whose fault it is.” Actually, there’s a lot of good in that. One of the authors, Rachel Black, has worked out with her husband that when she/they are faced with the ubiquitous and painful question, “Do you have children/why not?” She says “My husband didn’t want them.” Childless women are demonized and ostracized, and assumed to be selfish. It was his decision, let him take the responsibility socially. She also made him get a vasectomy, so he wouldn’t reproduce with someone else, should their marriage fall apart under this incredible strain, and move on to a younger woman.
                 This book also exposes what an arduous and punishing route adoption can be – especially in Britain. Adoptive parents must be rich, young and healthy — a hundred times more qualified than a natural parent. One interviewee commented on the British government’s stress on keeping adoptive children in touch with their biological families. “If they’re that keen to keep in touch, why are they not looking after the child themselves? This constant having to keep in touch, we couldn’t actually break free and be our own family, and have a proper, intimate family life, there were always going to be people looking over your shoulder, who you’re answerable to.” 

Silent No More            

If you haven’t ordered Exhaler Pamela Jeanne’s Tsigdinos’s Silent Sorority yet, here’s a teaser: 

“You should never, never ask a woman when/if she’s going to have kids. If she’s already been trying for a while, it will feel like a knife to the heart. It forces her to either tell you more than she wanted to or to lie. Because if she had wanted to talk about having kids in the first place, she would have.”

 “Telling a woman who has lost a baby that ‘it wasn’t meant to be’ is not compassionate. It’s merely a way of easing your own discomfort by dismissing ours. Minimizing our pain, be it offering ‘solutions’ or explanations only serves to make yourself feel better while inflicting further hurt on us … It’s hard to contemplate the randomness of the cruel universe, where bad things happen to good people, and it may make it easier for them to sleep if they can convince themselves that there is a reason for it, and we must’ve deserved it. Telling us you know what we’re going through because it took you X months to get pregnant minimizes our feelings. You had a happy ending. We may not.”

 “I’ve been stripped down and made new on this journey. I’ve become utterly vulnerable, and forced to see the world differently.  I’ll never have the kind of optimism that some people have that anything is possible, that it will all work out in the end.”

 “I have had to take responsibility for my life in a deeper way than I ever had before. And because we live in a society where so few seem to take true responsibility for themselves and for those around them, it is very lonely. We don’t live in a world that really embraces soul-searching, and so much of this journey has been about soul-searching for me. I think a lot of the bad and unsolicited advice and glib responses to infertility (like “just adopt” or “it wasn’t meant to be”) are because people are so uncomfortable with pain and the possibility of pain with no resolution. We can’t take away the pain. All we can do is transform the response to it.”

 Adapted from Silent Sorority: A (Barren) Woman Gets Busy, Angry, Lost, and Found, Copyright 2009, Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos.  www.silentsorority.com.

Pamela Jeanne’s memoir is the first honest empty-handed one-person take since:

Why Don’t You Have Kids? Living a Full Life Without Parenthood,

By Lesley Lafayette

This book, published in 1994, is a bit dated — not in the essential common sense and truth of its pronouncements, but in that the boldness of the author’s opinions. They would be entirely unacceptable in today’s family-at-all-costs universe.

            I found it extremely reflective of my own experience, though it won’t be to everyone’s:

“Looking back, I can see now that my desperate desire to have a baby came not from some internal biological drive, nor was it the result of thoughtful introspection and practical planning. It was my response to a hysterical society, a culture that stripped me of my intrinsic worth and told me point-blank that to fail to reproduce was to fail.”

“…there was no opposing view, no voice of reason, no organization or group to provide a dialogue.”

            On giving up the baby quest: “I stopped beating myself up. You’ve heard the old joke about hitting yourself on the head with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop? It does.”

            Writes the author, “I know what it is to obsessively grieve and despair because I did not fit in to what society deemed as the norm, what my peers and the media and even my government saw as acceptable and ‘fulfilled.’ I know what it feels like to be alone, to be different, to be isolated, to be ignored.”

            She begs the mass media to: “Have some characters who don’t even want kids and enjoy a happy life nevertheless. Have someone opt for an abortion occasionally rather than turn wistful and blushing about her pregnancy as if she drank a cup of Instant Mommy, as if all the problems of the world will be solved when she has her baby.

            “The fact that more than a million abortions are performed each year in this country is a testament that not every pregnancy is a wanted one. Writers should be free to portray real life and not the sugar and spice that conservative advertisers force upon them … tell the truth.”

            She describes taking part in a T.V. talk show on women and childbearing where she was the only dissenting voice in a panel of “talking uteruses” – including a woman who, with grown children in their 30s, had an egg-donor baby at 52.

            “Each and every one of them … had one goal and one goal only in her life: to produce an infant as quickly as possible, spending whatever money she had and all of the time it might take – even going into debt and emotional quicksand if necessary.”

            Lafayette’s opinions would be unacceptable in today’s media environment. The trajectory of the book leads towards a directive to embrace a “Child Free” identity – to form groups and make friendships with others similarly situated. It’s a great idea, but my concern is that this further segregates the Child Free/Childless from mainstream society, when what is needed is mutual respect, interaction and consideration. 

            The Child Free Network she began but seems to have distanced herself from has a spotty web site that seems to have drifted from the author’s original worthy aims, degenerating into snarky commentary about “breeders.” There are articles complaining about other people’s “noisy, stinky” kids.  This is certainly disappointing. Still, the original book is an honest, interesting read to balance today’s fertility-centric media message.

                                                            ###

In this month’s issue of Exhale, Mr. Tracey talked to me about the difficulty of dating women rapidly running out of eggs while banking a faulty gene pool:

When we think of “Irish Madness,” it’s usually a happy phenomenon — the wild celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day.  A new book tells a darker story.

Irish Catholics have long been known for taking pride in their large broods. But fear of passing on genetically inherited schizophrenia stopped this author from carrying on that tradition.  

   “I very much wanted to have lots of children,” says Patrick Tracey, author of Stalking Irish Madness, Searching for the Roots of my Family’s Schizophrenia.   ”But fear of passing on my family’s disease made it impossible.”

When we think of “Irish Madness,” it’s usually a happy phenomenon — the wild celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day.  A new book tells a darker story.

Irish Catholics have long been known for taking pride in their large broods. But fear of passing on genetically inherited schizophrenia stopped this author from carrying on that tradition.   

  “I very much wanted to have lots of children,” says Patrick Tracey, author of Stalking Irish Madness, Searching for the Roots of my Family’s Schizophrenia.   “But fear of passing on my family’s disease made it impossible.”

His haunting memoir, published by Bantam last August, was named one of Slate magazine’s Best Books of 2008, awarded the 2009 KEN book award by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and most recently, recognized with a prestigious PEN award.

After an idyllic childhood as the youngest of five siblings, the first of Tracey’s two sisters succumbed to rapid-onset schizophrenia when he was just eighteen. “One after the other. I realized that like my mother, I could be a carrier. Or worse, might go schizophrenic myself.”

Schizophrenia generally manifests by 30, and when Tracey cleared that bar, he began to think earnestly about marriage, and worry “fervently” about paternity. 

“Marriage would’ve suited me fine,” says Tracey, still single at 50. “But every woman I met was frantically running out of eggs, and couldn’t seem to understand that parenthood was off the table for me.”

He tried to tell them he was not Daddy material, given his questionable gene bank. His progressively heavy drinking was another obstacle.

“I was hit hard by my family’s collapse,” he says.

Before he graduated college, his mother died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, he thinks, spurred by “grief and loss” soon after her youngest daughter was diagnosed with the hereditary illness.  Having grown up with a mother and brother in the insane asylum, she’d known she was at risk to pass on the disease, but was persuaded otherwise by well-meaning doctors.

Says Tracey, “I felt there was not much point to life if something like schizophrenia–or a similar life-shattering tragedy–could just come along and take someone out.”

He became a serial monogamist, “An outgrowth of my commitment-phobia, itself an outgrowth of my fear of passing on this severe hereditary mental illness. I tried to disguise myself as a noble alcoholic savage.  Truly I was all over the place.” 

 It wasn’t until he hit bottom, alone, that he straightened out. Traveling to Ireland, he found the roots of schizophrenia in maternal malnutrition due to famine. While doing his research, he lived on a campsite where he observed families at close hand, with a raging storm of feelings.

A Fascination with Families

 “I am endlessly fascinated by families,” Tracey admits. “The way they interact, their dynamics, what makes them tick, why some find a measure of happiness where others do not, how some play a bad hand well and others with the best cards toss them away. My family was torn asunder, schizophrenia cast a shadow over us all, the sane obsessed that we might be carriers.”

Why didn’t he just find a nice girl and adopt?   “The ugly truth is that I was not fit to parent. Drinking was a form of self-laceration — survivor’s guilt, a way of going crazy myself every night — a mixed-up man’s way of crying.”   

Though eight years have passed since his last drink, at this stage of his life he’d rather help his ill sisters and his nephew – the sole offspring among his four siblings — than start his own family.
        But he feels he’s paid a big price for his choice. “I could’ve been a good father and family man if I hadn’t got lost in despair.  I’ve had some great relationships, and vent my paternal spleen through my nephew.  The care of him fell to me from the late 1980s through the 1990s, but I never dared spread my own seed.”

When he’s around a particularly well-adjusted family, he can’t help but feel like an outsider:  “Families gather with other families, and in Ireland they were out in force.”

A Special Role

He felt less the odd man out when he saw himself reflected in the community. Every other village, he found, has a Bachelor Walk or some bachelor legend. “Ireland has a rich tradition of bachelorhood,” he discovered.

Only the oldest sons were financially eligible for marriage, and they had to wait until they inherited the tiny potato patch. The younger brothers were either sent to the seminary, abroad or became bachelors.

Men’s Biological Clocks                   

            Ironically, Tracey learned, this primogeniture of oldest sons – who only inherited the family property at 50, when their own fathers died – is one of the major contributing factors to schizophrenia itself. Recent studies have linked the schizophrenia gene to a mutation in elderly sperm, detailed in the memoir. www.stalkingirishmadness.com.

Nadya Suleman has had extensive plastic surgery to resemble another famous mother, Angelina Jolie. While her octuplets have turned into a national freak show and blog snark-fest, it’s not hard for me to follow her logic.

In the third issue of Exhale I discuss “Octomom” as a natural product of a deregulated fertility industry,  and highlight a memoir by another mother whose judgement was questioned. 

Creation Fixation

             Today, you have to explain your decision not to utilize the new technology if you have even the vaguest desire to have children.  Why suffer the stigma of being different in an increasingly conformist society, where being married and childless is seen as more odd than being a never-married parent, a single mother of many?

            From a front-row seat, I saw how the sexual revolution impacted my parents’ generation, who came of age and married in the fifties. It hit like a hurricane, breaking apart marriages, spawning a generation of latchkey kids, sending women to conciousness-raising groups and out into the work-force. In the same way that the pill ushered in both the sexual revolution of the sixties and the feminist resurgence of the seventies, the fertility frenzy has impacted society of the nineties and aughts; the outside of the envelope is being pushed further and further out. The business world, education system, dating conventions and even family pecking order rely heavily on the idea that the fertility industry is a safety net.  When I started a new job at 35, I was warned, off the record, not to get pregnant the first year, then brightly advised: “That’s what we have our fertility benefit for.”

But it doesn’t work for everyone; it didn’t for me. In my recent interview on Belief.net, sparked by my last month’s Exhale column, I wonder if the answer isn’t advising young women to freeze their eggs, but rather, retuning society to make it easier economically for young women to start their families at more appropriate ages: http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2009/01/christina-gombar-an-interview.html.

The Right to Reproduce?

            Nadya’s case raises the very uncomfortable issue of whether or not having as many children as she wants, by whatever means, is as much a feminist issue as abortion rights.   In the Guardian, Jennifer Block wonders if it’s not time to “take a close, hard look at our healthcare priorities. While we have the technology and expertise to keep a 1.5-pound premie (Suleman’s tiniest) alive outside the womb, standard American maternity care is resulting in poorer and poorer outcomes for the vast majority of mothers and babies.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/feb/10/nadya-suleman-octuplets-ethics

Birthing versus Parenting

            “Any fool can have a child.” Our new president’s words, not mine – said on the campaign trail, speaking to an African American audience. Properly raising children, President Obama says, is another issue entirely.  Perhaps for their own safety, it’s a blessing that Nadya Suleman’s children will be living in a fish bowl.

In a blog post titled, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” author Karen de Balbian Verster discusses her dilemma after witnessing the abuse of one of her daughter’s playmates. She also sites an alcoholic woman who boasted of abusing her dog, but succeeded in adopting a Chinese infant.    

            De Balbian Verster asks: “I wonder why we as a society allow people who are unfit parents to become parents in the first place? It’s a slippery slope, I know, but shouldn’t there be some conditions in place before one has a child? Things like another parent, mental health, financial stability? It seems like too little, too late to worry about these things after the child has been starved in the basement, burned by cigarettes, or sexually abused. But since we can’t seem to ban assault rifles, I’m afraid licensing parents must remain a futuristic concept.

http://mysite.verizon.net/kdebv/2008.12.01_arch.html

An “Unfit Mother” Reflects

             Polio survivor Anne Finger was told she was unfit to give birth: it was dangerous, she was disabled, she was unmarried. Her 1990 book, Past Due, a Story of Disability, Pregnancy and Birth tells what happened when she defied standard advice.

        After suffering polio as a toddler, Finger grew up subject to one butchering operation after another in the vain attempt to bring life back to her atrophied leg muscles. Because of her horrendous experiences with the medical establishment, when she decided to become a mother, she eschewed traditional medicine and chose midwifery, despite the fact that she was an atypical, and potentially high risk obstretric patient.  The midwife miscalculated, the labor went on too long, and her son wound up inhaling his own fecal matter. Death, or a life sentence of severe disability was predicted by the angry medical establishment that she finally reverted to.

            Despite her son’s full recovery, Finger’s trauma – first under the knife of post-polio childhood surgeries, then a well-meaning midwife unequal to the task of her  complicated delivery, and finally, the shaming of the medical establishment – scarred he.: Her thoughts, during those terrible days when her son struggled for life:  “I do know that if he dies, I will think that technology is the monstrous, inhuman, a mad scientist’s creation; and if he lives, I will think it a miracle.”

          One could as easily apply these words to the current fertility industry frenzy: “I have the places where I draw my lines about what I would and would not do; and other people … people I respect, have different lives. But I’m aware too of how social pressure can work to keep people in line: how when a technology is available it becomes harder and harder not to utilize it. If you’re over 35 and pregnant, you have to explain your decision not to have amnio, justify yourself.”

Overfertility in the Age of The Feminine Mystique

        Richard Yate’s dark 1960 novel, Revolutionary Road, is now a gripping movie starring Kate Winslet. While the narrative is one of over-fertility rather than infertility, the story throws into dramatic relief how fragile and tenuousness is this largely taken-for-granted business of birth, for the child, for the mother. How destructive, yet somehow inescapable, the issue of maternal identity – for better or in this case, for worse.

Blogs and Bits

 http://www.moretolife.co.uk

       This British site for involuntarily childless includes U.S. news, coping strategies, and personal stories. A good resource for those who wind up without.

One in a hundred people suffer from the chronic illness schizophrenia. That’s five million people in America alone. So why is this genetic illness so stigamatized?

Staking Irish Madness has been named one of 2008’s Best Books by Slate magazine: http://www.slate.com/id/2206635/pagenum/all/

Searching for the Roots of His Family’s Schizophrenia

             A warm spring day, April 1979, broadcast journalism class at the University of Rhode Island.  Dr. Snodgrass, our instructor mutters, “Pat Tracey, not here again. That’s no surprise,” in his bizzarrely deep, newscasterly voice.  The professor was normally not sarcastic, but on the day our projects were due, he may have felt a small amount of disdain his right.

But it is characteristic of life that the one time Dr. Snodgrass took a liberty, it was unwarranted.

“His mother died,” piped a hippy girl. “A stroke.” Everyone in class, but especially the girls, emitted sounds of distressed sympathy. It seems everyone knew Pat but me.        

            It wasn’t until reading Pat’s book, Stalking Irish Madness: Searching for the Roots of My Family’s Schizophrenia, nearly 30 years later, that I learned his mother’s stroke was no random event. 

       His memoir, published by Bantam August 26, proves that, in the author’s words, “Real tragedy may be the best training ground for a memoirist.  Madness is a universal concern. It may be the deepest fear for all of us, because more than anything else we are our minds. We are a family that has experienced in a first hand way what few feel free to speak of.”

          Stalking Irish Madness has been picked by the association of independent book shop owners for their Indie Next List of Great Reads From Booksellers You Trust.