Looking backwards ~ by Jay

I had this secret little goal that I would have 31 posts to match the 31 days of October. Here we are on the last day, and the ticker reads 28. So I'm letting go of my goal without regret. Having 31 in my mind pushed me to post more often this month, and that in turn freed me up to write about ideas that weren't entirely formed, captured as they bubbled up and swirled around in my mind and then went out there into cyber-space without being carefully edited and reworded. I think that's made the blog livelier. What I've written this month is a fairly accurate representation of what I've been thinking about.

The spate of blogging has moved us over 100 posts, which feels like a milestone, and I've been reading back through what I've written as well as the drafts I've left sitting there. I have something to say about power that I can't quite articulate yet; that one needs to be finished. I'm just as glad I didn't post the one about my mother-in-law, though!

When we first started, Mary mentioned that I was paralyzed at the thought of writing my blogging mission statement. I still am. It's better that I didn't write a mission statement, after all, because it would have limited me. I didn't expect to write about Torah. I didn't think I was going to blog about feminism. Hah. I could have predicted that the posts that would draw the most attention would be about abortion, if I'd predicted that I was going to write them. I hoped this blog would help me find my writing style again, after years of writing mostly progress notes, and it has. I look over the work so far and I can hear the voices of my patients and my daughter and of Sam, and I can see myself growing more confident of my own voice.

We moved into our online house about six months ago. Now I've gotten the boxes unpacked, the books out on the shelves, a few pictures on the wall. I've baked something in the oven that spattered onto the bottom, so when you turn it on there's a whiff of apple pie. We've had friends over and stayed up too late talking and laughing. I've lit Shabbat candles and hung up my mezzuzah, and Mary has her meditation space arranged the way she likes it. It's starting to feel like home.

I'm so tired ~ by Jay

I wrote a whole post about sleep and realized it was actually a lecture. It was just missing the PowerPoint slides. I'm thinking about sleep because I'm tired, deep-in-my-body tired, the kind of tired that aches, but can't go to sleep yet because if I let the dogs out now they'll wake me up at 5:00 AM to go out again.

Tired.

Like most of the tired people I see in the office, I'm tired because I don't get enough sleep. I stay up too late; I get up too early; the dog barks when the paper arrives or the garbage is emptied or the neighbor slams his car door. I forget to drink anything at work, guzzle two quarts of water after I get home and have to wake up twice during the night to pee. I'm on call and the beeper goes off at 2:00 AM. All the normal reasons. And one other that I don't usually admit to anyone.

I have sleep apnea. Sam told me about it originally, and that's how most people are diagnosed - their partner complains that they snore and they tell their doctors. Or they tell their doctors that they never feel rested. I resisted testing and treatment for over a year, until I was so tired I couldn't really drive safely. Why? Because I was ashamed. I still am.

My patients never ask me how I know so much about CPAP, or why I'm so persistent about testing and treatment. I pay out of pocket for my supplies so I don't have to use the supplier designated by my insurance, which is a company connected to the hospital where I work, and where one of my patients runs the CPAP section. I request a single room when I go to conferences so I don't have a roommate asking me about the equipment. I cringe whenever the TSA checker looks through the Xray unit at my carry-on luggage.

CPAP has saved my life, and restored me to at least a semblance of my energetic self. But CPAP means we can't go camping anymore, because I can't sleep anywhere without electricity. It means I can't fall asleep curled up in Sam's arms. I don't mind wearing the mask - it's actually comforting and almost soothing. After six years I associate CPAP with sleep. It's part of my nightly ritual, and it has the same effect as a reading of "Goodnight, Moon" has on a well-conditioned child. But I never tell anyone about it.

Obstructive sleep apnea is most often complication of obesity. I have sleep apnea because I'm overweight, and it taps into all the shame and grief I carry along with the extra pounds. That's why I ended up typing out an academic lecture: I was hiding my real self behind my expertise. Everything I know about change tells me that I have to accept people where they are, really value them, if I'm going to help them change. That's the paradox: in order to change, I have to love myself as I am. I don't judge anyone else as harshly as I judge myself, and I trust that you all won't judge me, either. Sharing this, even anonymously, is really scary, but I think it's a first step toward valuing myself where I am now. I'm a good mom, a caring doc, a supportive and passionate wife, a skilled facilitator and a woman of diverse interests and talents. And I have sleep apnea.

Mommy, there should be a law ~ by Jay

(From Jay: I am not making this up, I am simply transcribing last night's conversation)

Mommy, you should be a lawmaker so there could be a law saying that everybody should be treated the same, even girls and boys and black people and white people and Spanish people and dogs and cats. Maybe not fish, though. Why isn't there a law? Isn't that what Martin King Lutheran wanted?

What does a feminist mother look like? ~ by Jay

Bluemilk posted interview questions for mothers who identify as feminists. That's me!

How would you describe your feminism in one sentence?

Susan B. Anthony said it first and best: Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.

When did you become a feminist? Was it before or after you became a mother?

15 years before I became a mother. I realized I was a feminist when I was 24 and working on an OB/Gyn service in medical school. I probably became a feminist at some point in my early teens, but didn't call it by its right name until much later.

What has surprised you most about motherhood?

People often hand me trash to hold. Seriously, I never saw that coming. It's mostly my daughter, but sometimes her friend - candy wrappers, used stickers, crumpled pieces of paper. Trash. Who knew?

How has your feminism changed over time? What is the impact of motherhood on your feminism?

I've become more committed and more outspoken and angrier over the past 23 years. I don't think my essential values have changed, but I now see most - all - of the world through a feminist lens in a way I didn't at first. Since my daughter was born, I have become more aware of the sexualization and gender stereotyping in kid culture. I've also become more interested in and more engaged by work/life balance issues and the different experiences of fathers and mothers who work outside the home.

What makes your mothering feminist? How does your approach differ from a non-feminist mother’s? How does feminism impact upon your parenting?

My mothering is feminist because I try to respond to my daughter as she is and not as I think a girl should be, and I actively resist gender stereotyping when I can. There's the whole cheerleading thing, of course. I can't imagine parenting any other way, so it's hard to figure out what part is feminism - it's just who I am. I want my mothering to reflect my values, and my values are feminist. I imagine that a non-feminist mother would encourage her daughter to seek out quieter, more subservient roles in school and in other groups, and would be upset to find her daughter spattered with mud in the backyard. When that happens, I love it, because it reassures me that my daughter isn't letting her love for clothes get in the way of energetic play.

Being a feminist mother also means I'm married to a feminist, so my daughter sees a very different relationship model than many of her friends, and she hears the same values from her dad that she does from her mom.

Do you ever feel compromised as a feminist mother? Do you ever feel you’ve failed as a feminist mother?

On average twice a day. Every time my daughter does anything with a Disney princess connection, I feel compromised. When she put on her Hannah Montana costume with the fishnet stockings, blonde wig and miniskirt I wondered precisely what I was allowing to happen. Two years ago I actually took her to a Libby Lu birthday party because she so much wanted to go; if there's a place more anti-feminist than Libby Lu, I have yet to find it.

Has identifying as a feminist mother ever been difficult? Why?

Yes, because it sets me apart from other moms in a way that can read as really snotty to some people. Why can't my daughter buy the same stuff and dress the same way and watch the same TV as other people's kids? If I explain why, I sound as if I'm judging other people's choices (and, in effect, I am). And being a feminist mother also means standing up to my own mother and asking her to change, which is pretty damned difficult.

Motherhood involves sacrifice, how do you reconcile that with being a feminist?

I don't see anything to reconcile. To me, feminism doesn't mean "women shouldn't make sacrifices". It means "women shouldn't be the only one making sacrifices, and we shouldn't assume every woman will want to make them at all". And it also means we should recognize that women pay a price for mothering, and not assume it's just "what women do". As long as the sacrifice is recognized and shared, I don't think it compromises my feminism at all.

If you have a partner, how does your partner feel about your feminist motherhood? What is the impact of your feminism on your partner?

He's still here, so I guess it's OK with him. He had neither a vote nor a veto over my feminism. The immediate impact is that I hold him to his commitment to be a fully involved and engaged parent. He's a man of integrity and a feminist himself, so he gets it.

Do you feel feminism has failed mothers and if so how? Personally, what do you think feminism has given mothers?

Feminism isn't monolithic enough to have succeeded or failed. We're better off as women - and as mothers - than we were 40 years ago. Feminism has given mothers the right to make their own decisions, the right to parent their own children outside of the nearly mythical nuclear family. Feminism has given some mothers the ability to earn an independent living. Feminism hasn't - yet - banished the patriarchal assumptions about parenting that have led us to the current mommy mythos: mothering as the pinnacle experience of true womanhood. But feminism didn't "give us" the myth, and feminism can't save us from it. We can use feminism as a tool to save ourselves and our daughters.

Table Talk ~ by Jay

Mommy, why do some people say women should do all the cooking and take care of the children?

Hmm. Who did you hear say that?

I asked Daddy why he cooked all the time and he said it was because he liked to cook, but he said some people thought women should do all the cooking and women should take care of the children, and men should only go out and earn money. Why do they think that?

Well, some people think there's only one way to be a family, and that's to have a daddy who earns money and a mommy who stays home and takes care of the kids.

But some families have just a mommy, and some families have two mommies, and some families only have a daddy. And some families don't have any kids. They just have dogs, or cats, or a hamster.

And they're all families, but some people think there's only one way to make a family that's safe for kids, and they feel afraid when they realize that people like us don't agree with them.

What are they afraid of?

I think maybe they're afraid that if there's more than one way to make a family, they'll lose something that they have.

Mommy, that doesn't make any sense.

Rock Creature ~ by Jay

I'm generally not much with the glue gun, but I'm quite proud of today's mother-daughter collaboration. They're doing a science unit on pebbles, sand and silt, and she came home last week with an assignment to make a "rock creature". It had to use at least two rocks; it could be a person, an animal or something imaginary. My daughter's original plan was to make a dog, but we couldn't find any dog-body-shaped rocks (once I vetoed the one that weight about 2 pounds). So she changed to a monster, and she found a box of wooden beads in the back of the craft closet and we swiped a few shells from Sam's collection. My contribution was to wield the gun where she pointed, and here's "a monster named George":


The appendages on the front, which might suggest that the monster's name should be "Georgina", are actually arms, according to the creator.

Distance ~ by Jay

Sam's away for five days and we're having "girl's week", as my daughter calls it. I always enjoy the first night he's away, even with the extra work. I can read in bed or watch TV as long as I like. I can spend the whole evening reading or doing crosswords or poking around the Internet without feeling like I'm ignoring him. I take her out for pizza or dinner at Friendly's, places Sam doesn't like. She can be a loud girl without worrying about hurting Daddy's ears. But after a day or two, the novelty wears off and I really start to miss him. Which amazes me because for the first five years of our relationship we were apart more than we were together. And the funny thing is, I think it saved us.

Sam and I were an object lesson: don't start dating someone in January of your senior year in college. By the time we realized that our pragmatic plan to break up after graduation wasn't really going to work, we were committed to graduate schools 3,000 miles apart. We lived together over the summer, and then he left in August just before I started med school. We tried breaking up in October, but it didn't last. We settled into an uneasy routine of phone calls and letters (this was 1982; no Email or IM or cellphones) and worried about our long distance bills (remember, 1982). We went to a wedding over Thanksgiving and afterwards Sam said "I'd be willing to have a long-distance relationship for four years if it meant not losing you". I'd done the long-distance thing before, and it had ended badly. I said "I'm not doing this unless we get engaged. It's too hard, and too risky". Sam had already made it clear that he didn't want to get married. So I left to go back to school and somehow managed to pass my first-semester finals.

On Christmas night, after talking for three days, Sam gave in and we decided to get married. We spent another week together and then Sam left again. That was our pattern for the next three years, including the first nine months of our marriage. We saw each other every six to eight weeks during the school year; over the summer Sam was camping in a remote area doing his PhD research, and during those three to four months we spoke every five days for about an hour but didn't see each other at all.

So how did this save us? It wasn't any fun, and it wasn't very satisfying in a lot of ways, but it allowed us to focus all our energy on school when we were apart. For the three or five days we were together, we put aside everything else. Once I actually moved in with Sam in my fourth year of medical school, we lost that. Since we saw each other all the time, we didn't set aside time to spend together, and with the demands of grad school, medical school and residency, it was easy to avoid talking. When we were apart, we spoke on the phone every night for at least 10 or 15 minutes. At least once a week, we talked for an hour or more. I knew what he had for dinner; he knew when I had oral exams in anatomy and why I hated my biochem professor. We felt connected to the details of each other's lives despite the distance. And we had to learn to talk to each other, really talk. We couldn't use sex as shorthand for communication. If I was angry, I had to tell him so - he couldn't figure it out from the expression on my face (again, 1982: no webcams).

When we first started dating, I figured we'd go to schools nearby and live together. I'm actually really glad we didn't. The transition to grad school (him) and med school (me) was very challenging for both of us, and if we'd had to navigate that and figure out how to be together at the same time, I don't think we would have survived it. By the time we lived together for 12 months straight, we'd been together for six years and married for four. It was still hard t0 negotiate our time management and our different styles of running a house; if we'd had that conflict before we were really committed to each other, I think one of us would have walked out. And if we'd moved in together right away, I would never have lived on my own. It was our long-distance relationship that forced me to find my way around new places, move, pack, rent houses, get insurance, do all the housework, make all the decisions myself. I was 22 when we got engaged, and 24 and living with my parents when we were married, but despite that I've lived independently all over the country. I'm glad I don't have to do it any more, but it's nice to know that I can.

Long-distance relationships have changed in the past 25 years. I just checked my Email and fond a note from Sam to our daughter, who sent him a digital picture of the rock creature we made this morning and typed her very first Email message to go with it. I don't have to keep track of Sam's hotel room or phone number and we don't have to worry about calling cards or long distance bills. We can talk more easily and more often when we're apart. And I think we appreciate being together more than we would have if we hadn't been apart so long.

Trick-or-Treat ~ by Jay

Tonight was trick-or-treat. In our area, trick-or-treat is officially designated as the Friday before October 31st between 6:00 and 8:00 PM. I took my daughter to a party at 4:00. A new experience for me: a party for which I had no responsibility. I didn't have to cook anything, buy anything, clean anything, or bring anything (except my kid). And Sam even took care of the homemade part of her costume:


Our daughter decided she wanted to be Hannah Montana, and she wanted to be able to put her candy inside the guitar. So we purchased her costume on Ebay, and Sam made the guitar out of Masonite, pink foam, styrene and wood. The top is open so the candy goes inside. They printed the logo, cut it out and attached it, with clearcoat over it in case it rained.

And rain it did, but the party kids were undeterred. They roamed the neighborhood in a pack followed by moms with umbrellas. The good news about the Hannah Montana costume is that the wig is plastic, so it was a nice, effective rain hat.

She's full of candy, towel-dried and being tucked in upstairs while I sit here drying off and getting read to write the rest of this morning's notes. And we just found out that one of the local colleges hosts trick-or-treat in the dorms on Halloween, so she'll get to go again on Wednesday to make up for the rain-shortened outing tonight.

One more thing: There's a new flavor of Tootsie Pops which is an abomination. Sour apple. Yuck. But aside from that, it's been a great night. Happy Halloween!

Definitions from my daughter ~ by Jay

I missed my daughter this morning because I had to leave for work before she was awake. But I picked her up early (avoiding the cheerleading class) and brought her home before dance.

We had the obligate meltdown when Mommy suggested a protein snack, and once she recovered she said "I should count to 10 when I get mad. That's what my teacher says". She went on: "And I should count to 10 when I'm sad, or when I'm angry". "What's the difference between being mad and being angry"? asks her English-major mother. "Angry is like when you're looking forward to something and it doesn't happen, or the computer doesn't work right. Mad is when someone says or does something that makes you mad or sad". Ah.

Tomorrow is trick-or-treat here, and we're invited to a party to while away the hours until it's official trick-or-treat time (yes, we have a law that not only moves trick-or-treat off Halloween night but decrees that it happens between 6:00 PM and 8:00 PM. A law. About trick-or-treat.)
Anyway, we are very excited about this party. Why? "Because I can chase Collin. And Charlie. And the whole gang". The whole gang? "Well, the boy gang". Is there a girl gang? "That's me and Josie and Alyssa and Katie and Michaela". Oh, I met Katie last week. "Not that Katie. The other Katie. Only me and Josie know the Katie you met, and the whole gang has to know everybody. Otherwise it's not a gang". Ah again.

Prelude/Angry middle-aged woman ~ by Jay

Anger is the theme of my week. It came bubbling up during a teaching session I co-facilitated Monday night, and the soundtrack was playing when I got my hair cut yesterday.

Give a moment or two to the angry young man
With his foot in his mouth and his heart in his hand...

When I posted about my daughter and clothes, I read this response

Clothes and rhinestones and shoes and lipstick -- it's all fun. It's not who she is.

Which I know. That was pretty much my point: I don't want her to define herself by her looks. That's what the world sees, and that what the world reacts to. After posting that comment, Mama called me on my s*** in an Email exchange yesterday. She said

I hear your anger in your posts about these things. I think it is anger from your experiences and fear of what your daughter might experience. Is that accurate?

Um, yeah. That's accurate.

She goes on to say

... you don't want her to think she is part of the thing you are angry with in the world.

No, I don't. So I need to sort out what's pushing my buttons here. I was a socially awkward kid, and I've never been conventionally attractive, although I didn't get really heavy until after college. In high school, I couldn't wear junior sizes and I couldn't buy cute clothes. I never did figure out what to do with my hair. Makeup I understood, thanks to my theater training, but hair defeated me. I didn't have sleepovers where we did each other's hair and nails and looked at fashion magazines. I'm sure some of this came from an attempt to avoid competing with my mother, since I certainly wasn't going to look like her. I was pretty disdainful of my mother when I was in high school and I was determined to be someone else entirely.

If I'm being honest, I also found it very unsettling - terrifying, even - to be the target of unsolicited male attention. So it was easier in so many ways to hide under a layer of fat. I still had boyfriends, but I removed myself from all the "girly" stuff and didn't have many female friends.

So I don't really know how to do "girly", and I worry that my daughter will disdain my non-girliness just as I looked down on my mother. It's probably inevitable, no matter what, but I'm not looking forward to it.

I believe I've passed the age of consciousness and righteous rage
I've found that just surviving was a noble fight
I once believed in causes too...

OK, the song's not a perfect fit, because I still do believe in causes, and I still have righteous rage. In addition to the personal reasons I object to "girliness", there are real social and political issues at play. And here Mama and I part ways. Mama was a cheerleader. She says "I thought of myself as an athlete", and I believe she did. She didn't experience cheerleading as a side activity but as a worthy experience in its own right. Fair enough, but cheerleading wouldn't exist without football, and football would certainly exist without cheerleading. One is primary, and one is not. And the primary activity belongs to the boys. I've never seen cheerleaders at a women's soccer or basketball game.

She said

{girliness} can exist without suppressing or oppressing women

and I don't think it does. I don't believe that intense interest in clothes and shoes and makeup and nail polish and little pink stuffed dogs would exist if it didn't serve a role for the patriarchy. The very definition of all of that as "feminine" and "girly" serves to reinforce the rigid gender roles that tag women as "less than" and trivialize our experiences. We live in a double bind: look like me and you're dismissed as invisible; look like my daughter or my mother and you're dismissed as a girly-girl. Bottom line? You're still not taken as seriously as a man.

I don't want to go to my grave in anger. I don't want my daughter to dismiss me as hopelessly old-fashioned, or worse feel diminished because I don't approve of her passions. I want her to experience herself as powerful in the world in all her fullness, not just powerful because of her looks. But first I need to see her as she really is and not as a representative of my own insecurities. I think I need to embrace the girly-girl side of my daughter if I want her to appreciate my point of view. It won't be easy - and I'm still not going to let her be a cheerleader, or take her out to Libby Lu - but I will try.

Picture day ~ by Jay

Today is picture day at my daughter's school.

Daughter of feminists love to wear short
Pink and white frilly dresses...

Well, it wasn't short, but it was pink and white and frilly. "Mommy, do you know why I didn't wear the shirt that's the same as the skirt? Because it would be too much".

Instead of the matching shirt, she wore a light green T shirt with an abstract sparkly design, her silver shoes, and two necklaces. She discarded the chunky bracelet after some consideration. She then spent ten minutes brushing her hair until it hung just right, straight down to about her chin and gently waving below that.

Daughters of feminists beg to wear lipstick
Each day from the age of three.
Daughters of feminists think that a princess is
What they are destined to be.

My daughter likes tight jeans, short skirts, clingy Tshirts and nail polish. She wishes for make-up and high heels. She's done her own hair since she was 4, and lately has taken to pulling it back into a ponytail and leaving one carefully curled piece loose over her ear. She wears at least one piece of jewelry each day. Her sneakers have rhinestones on them, and this year's brown cowboy boots are not getting the same everyday use as last year's pink ones. For High Holidays, she choose a wine-colored jersey dress with a square neck and an Empire waist, a perfect color and fit for her. She has kept one of her size T3 sweaters because it makes a nice shrug.

Why, when we bring her up just like a fella,
Who does she idolize? Cinderella!

My daughter hears "you're so pretty!" a lot more often than she hears "you're so strong/smart/brave/thoughtful". The imbalance bothers me so much that I have to force myself to tell her she's pretty so she doesn't wonder why Mommy and Daddy never say it, when everybody else does. My own mother calls her "sexy", which has led to some interesting conversations.

My mother. There's the core issue for me. My mother is gorgeous - tall, blond, green-eyed. I look like my father without the height: short, round, dark-haired. When I was growing up Mom was a six 6, and she adores clothes and shoes and good jewelry. I loved to watch her get dressed to go out.

When I was about 12 I noticed that my mother had to have someone tell her she looked OK before she could go out. If my father wasn't around, she'd ask me. If I wasn't around, I presume she asked my brother, or the babysitter. She valued her looks but she didn't trust her own assessment of them - she looked good only if someone else told her she looked good. And as she aged she started to panic. In her view, as she "lost" her looks, she lost her value as a person. My smart, loving, inventive, funny and talented mother feels worthless when she looks in the mirror and sees a 72 year old face.

My ambivalence about my daughter's girliness isn't just about feminism. Yes, I object to the ways in which the patriarchy defines femininity, and I worry about the sexualization of children and the objectification of women's bodies. I want my daughter to look at advertisements critically, and not just think "wow, cool shoes". Part of me is glad she has such a good time with clothes and hair doodle, and that she can get herself showered, dressed and coiffed independently. Her look is her own, not my construct.

But mostly I want her to value herself to her core. I want her to realize that the part of Girl she sees in the mirror is just that, part, not all. I want her to love herself for who she is, not just how she looks. This is the kid who worries when school announcements come home only in English because she knows - at 7 - that not all the parents read English. This is the kid who asked me if we could buy two presents last weekend so her friend's little sister wouldn't feel left out at the birthday party. This is the kid who could tie her shoes at 3, who choreographs her own dances, who does a wicked imitation of her father's facial expressions. Yes, she's beautiful, but she's so much more than that.

And someday I hope she'll hear Nancy White's song and love it like I do. She's the daughter of a feminist.

Talking to doctors ~ by Jay

So many people are afraid to talk to doctors. They're afraid in a social setting - I've seen people literally step back from me when they hear what I do for a living. They have a whole set of assumptions about my income and my attitude and my personality, and they become incapable of having a normal social conversation.

And they're afraid in professional settings as well. I hear a lot of medical questions from friends, and they're not asking for advice, really. They're asking me to explain what their doctor told them because the doctor didn't, and they were too frightened or overwhelmed or intimidated to ask the doctor for a clarification. And the doctor, unfortunately, didn't check to see if my friends understood them, or intended to follow through, or had any additional concerns.

I recently answered an Email on a listserve from a woman who wondered if it was OK to call the doctor the day after a visit to ask some additional questions, since she didn't remember or understand everything she was told. I said of course you can call. You should call. And you deserve a call back the same day, but don't be surprised if you don't get one. If you don't get an answer - or if the doc gives any sign of being irritated that you called - you may want to get a new doctor. I wasn't the only one who answered - doctors and laypeople alike on the list chimed in said sure, call. Or Email or fax or do whatever you can.

That's the piece of advice I give most often: it's OK to find a new doc if the one you have doesn't listen, or doesn't explain, or doesn't give you enough time. You deserve a doctor who treats you respectfully. It doesn't actually take that long.

Why don't doctors do better at this? Most never have the opportunity to learn. Medical school admissions generally don't select for students with good interpersonal skills, and there's scant attention paid during training. Many of us are frustrated with the bureaucracy and paperwork our jobs require. Those of us who spend most of our time talking and listening can get really annoyed when people get paid far more for diddling around with catheters and balloons. And then there's the whole change thing.

Everything we do with patients requires them to make a behavioral change. Take a pill, don't smoke, stop drinking, eat this, don't eat that, exercise this way but not that way. Show up to your appointments. Have blood drawn. Sometimes (often) people don't do what we ask. That can be very frustrating, especially if the doc has no idea what it is that motivates change and even less of an understanding how to have an impact on that process.

I'll keep working to help docs learn how to listen and how to speak to patients, but in the meantime, there's a lot we as patients can do to use our time with docs better.

Make a list of your concerns before the visit, and if the list is longer than two or three items, ask up front if you'll be able to get to all of them during that visit. Make your own decision about the most important item on the list, and say "It's really important to me that we discuss this today, even if we don't get to everything else".

Tell the doctor if you can't do something that s/he recommends, or if a medication didn't agree with you.

Don't be afraid to ask for clarification: what does that mean? How likely is that to happen? What can I expect from that medication? What should I do if I have a side effect? How will I get the results of that test?

If you know something important will be discussed, like the results of a diagnostic test, bring someone with you to help you remember. Write things down if you need to, or ask the doctor for written information.

Most of all, if you feel the doctor is dismissing your concerns, or not listening, or not valuing you as a person, get a new doctor. I know that's not always possible, depending on where you live, but it's usually worth a try.

And if you meet a doctor at a party, smile and ask her what she's reading lately, or what music she likes, or whether she's been hiking up the mountain. We're people, too, inside and outside the office.

My Happy Place ~ by Jay

Hey, that sappy title wasn't my idea. It was Mary's group writing assignment, on her personal blog.

My happy place isn't a place. While I love my house, and I have stared in amazement and pleasure at all sorts of landscapes, happiness for me is about being in relationship. I am most completely and un-self-consciously myself when I am singing for fun with a group of friends. I've stood around pianos, I've sat around with someone playing guitar, I've curled up on a screened porch in the dark. None of that matters. What matters is that I'm part of a group making music, that the voices of people I love join with mine and rise up, an offering of harmony in a world of discord and pain.

Just thinking about it evens my breath and quiets me at my core. When I was kid I hated being by myself and I was terrified of silence. I've come to appreciate reflection, silence and even time alone, although I've never been able to meditate. If I try to focus on my breath I start to fidget. When I sing I breathe more fully; I stop thinking about how I look and what I'm going to do next and attend to the line of melody. Words I thought I'd forgotten return from some space in my brain and fill out a song I first learned 40 years ago, or just last week. And sometimes, for just a moment or for a whole phrase or even, blessedly, for an entire song, I lose track of which voice is mine and hear only the music, only the whole and not its parts. That's the closest I've ever come to transcendence, and it's the purest peace I know.

Saturday morning ~ by Jay

Quickly, while my mother is upstairs, I pile the newspapers,
move the as-yet-uncarved pumpkin to the other counter
and race through the dishes.

Our ballerina is warming at the barre, bending her head with neat bun
over her knee in line with all the other girls, but to my eye
more graceful. Her father
is at shul, I am praying.

We will have a lost Saturday, giving up
our routine to honor the visiting grandmother, forgoing
our chores because it's hard for her,
after 52 years,
after a life,
to spend a weekend alone, to look at the chair
in the kitchen, the cover over the pool,
the porch furniture under its tarp,
and not think of him dying on the driveway.

It is her gift to us today, an excuse
To skip the grocery store
Ignore the bills
Dodge the committee planning
And get outside into the autumn
And perhaps,
over lunch or ice cream or while we walk the dog,
to lay ourselves to rest.

Cheerleading again ~ by Jay

So that cheerleading class I stumbled on last week turns out to be a new weekly event in my daughter's afterschool program. When I picked her up today for tap dance, there was the cheerleader, doing a handstand. Turns out it's a new program, happening weekly through December.

I am quite sure that none of the innumerable pieces of paper that rained on us recently had anything to do with cheerleading. I'd remember that. I would have said "no" to that. And I said "no" today, vigorously. A little too vigorously, since the woman I was talking to didn't plan the program herself.

When I called to apologize for yelling at her, I told her that I stood by the content of my tirade. My daughter has been asking to "be a cheerleader" for two years, and we've said "no". I'm all for somersaults and cartwheels, but not if it means girls on the sidelines while boys play the game. Not if it means girls selected to look good in short skirts so they can "inspire" the boys. Yes, I know cheerleading has its own competitions these days, so it can claim to be a sport itself, but that doesn't help.. The whole point of being a cheerleader is to cheer for a team, and despite the male cheerleaders in college programs, the vision my daughter has is girls in ponytails and cute outfits cheering for the boys.

My daughter, sobbing in the car as we drove to tap dance, did not understand why I was yelling at her teacher, and why she can't go to cheerleading any more. She won't understand, and I know I'm denying her something she really wants, but I'm not budging. This isn't harmless play. It isn't dress-up for fun and games. It's practice for life in a world where a woman's role is to cheer for the men, and look cute while she's doing it. That's not the life I want her to live, and I'll be damned if I'll let her do the dress rehearsal for it at age 7.

Loud girls ~ by Jay

Our drumming teacher has a really LOUD drum. It's loud enough when she plays it sitting down, but when she pulls the strap over her head and drums with it completely off the floor the sound just fills the space. It hits me down just below the heart, as if the sound itself is forcing my diaphragm up, controlling my breath. I love it. I want to play like that.

The same woman also teaches drum set, and she says girls often have a hard time hitting the drums hard enough. They're afraid of the noise, maybe, or scared of their own force. At 10 or 12, they're already holding themselves back. She tells them "if you can't hit that drum and hit it hard, make it loud, don't tell anyone you're studying with me. They won't believe you. I play LOUD, and so will you".

When I was 10, girls weren't allowed to take drum lessons. We weren't supposed to be loud. We were supposed to be quiet girls, good girls, girls who didn't draw attention to ourselves. I never quite managed it - I talked too much, laughed too loudly, bumped into furniture, loved to be the center of attention. Even though girls can play drums now, I know lots of those messages are still out there and they scare me. I want my daughter to be a loud girl if she wants to be. And I want her to be loud when she needs to be.

This has been one of the rare areas of conflict for us as parents. Sam has better-than-average hearing and he's pretty sensitive to noise. Our kid is not a noisy kid but she gets enthusiastic and she loves to sing. Same frequently asks her to speak more softly. I know he'd ask the same of a boy - he does, when there are boys here visiting - but I worry that this constant message from her father that she's too loud will combine with all the external social messages to tell her that girls are supposed to be meek, passive, quiet creatures. To tell her, ultimately, that she's wrong. I'm still fighting to claim a sense of my right-ness, and I want my daughter's experience to be better than mine. I think Sam gets that, but he also has a legitimate right not to have his ears assaulted in his own house.

I may have found the solution tonight: buy her drum set, soundproof her room, and send her for lessons with our teacher, who will tell her she has to be a loud girl.

Read Verlyn Klinkenborg ~ by Jay

In today's New York Times, Klinkenborg writes about the culture of self-effacement among young women and what that means for women as writers, and as human beings.

Why not, I asked, be as smart and perceptive as you really are? Why not accept what you’re capable of? Why not believe that what you notice matters? Another young woman at the table asked — this is a bald translation — won’t that make us seem too tough, too masculine? I could see the subtext in her face: who will love us if we’re like that?

The piece is worth reading.

Sleep ~ by Jay

When my daughter was six months old, my sister-in-law stopped speaking to me.

It took me a while to realize she'd stopped, since she lives a thousand miles away and we're not regular correspondents. But eventually I noticed, and I knew why. When I tell you, some of you will be tempted to stop speaking to me, too. I want to say first that I claim no responsibility for this. Sam and I have no special knowledge, no tricks, no sense that we are superior beings for bringing this about.

What did we do? We had a baby who slept through the night at ten weeks.

Not just that, but we had a baby who put herself to sleep from birth. In fact, it was impossible to rock her to sleep; you had to put her down in her crib awake and leave her there. If we did that, she went to sleep. By six weeks she was waking once or twice a night, and then at 10 weeks she slept through. Plus two naps a day.

Remember: I know this wasn't my doing. She came wired that way.

My sister-in-law, unfortunately, did not get the sleep-option baby. She got a kid who couldn't put herself to sleep and didn't like to be left alone. She has a daughter who didn't sleep through the night until she was four, and then not consistently. And worse yet, she and my brother-in-law couldn't negotiate a plan to deal with sleep. Being around them during this stage was painful. They were so tired and so conflicted and so angry, but there was no talking about it. I think she'd convinced herself that no babies slept through the night, and then there we were, and it was just intolerable. If we could do it and she couldn't, then she must be doing something wrong (in her sleep-deprived mind, not mine). So she stopped speaking to me.

I learned a lot about sleep when I became a mother. I learned that some babies sleep and some don't, and for the first six weeks at least there's very little a parent can do to change that. I learned that people feel strongly about sleep training, or not sleep training, or co-sleeping, or separate bedrooms. When my daughter was three months old, we told her doctor that she was sleeping in her own room, through the night. Our wonderful, caring, attentive family doc looked down at the baby and said "oh, sweetie, you don't need to be self-sufficient yet". I left feeling that I had somehow proven myself to be fundamentally non-maternal, leaving my precious baby all alone in her big, empty room all night long. The baby, blissfully unaware of my turmoil, went happily to bed for her nap when we got home. In her crib. Alone.

I was reminded of all this at Rosh Hashanah, when our rabbi gave a sermon about sleep training. Yes, our rabbi is a new mom; she and her partner welcomed a baby boy last January. No one in our community criticized her for conceiving and bearing a child in a lesbian relationship; no one questioned her three-month maternity leave; no one objected to her occasional absence from the bimah to feed the baby during services. But when she decided that they needed to sleep train their son, who was still waking every two hours to nurse at six months old - well! then there was criticism. And advice. And stern warnings that she would either doom the child to a sense of abandonment, if she let him cry, or stifle his ability to be self-soothing, if she didn't. That wasn't the point of her sermon, but those were my thoughts as she spoke. So many people feel they can tell parents what they should do. But each kid, each family, each circumstance is different.

Being a mother has made me a better doctor. I learned that the most important question to ask a new parent is "how are you sleeping?" I know enough not to tell them that they should sleep train, or that they shouldn't. Instead I tell them that I know how hard this is; that each family finds their way through the night by a different path; that what works for you at six months may not work at twelve, or eighteen, and that it's OK to make a change. That kids come wired the way they are, and our job is to respond to that wiring in a way that meets their needs while honoring our own, as best we can. Thanks to my friends and my community, I am able to counsel my patients about night weaning, although I didn't breastfeed my adopted daughter. I can normalize the isolating, overwhelming experience of dealing with a demanding baby and never getting to sleep, or shower. I can help counsel them about negotiating with their partners. But one thing I don't do is tell my patients my own story. I'm afraid they'll stop speaking to me.

Chaos ~ by Jay

We're having our front yard landscaped. This is a wonderful thing, really - it's a gift from my mother, and it will look absolutely gorgeous when it's done. But the process is unexpectedly wearing on me. They've pulled out most of the plants, taken out the pathways and left the lawn a muddy mess. We have a yellow front-loader parked in front of our house, along with piles of gravel and stacks of pavers, and our driveway is home to a big yellow tool box and a host of odd and scary-looking pipes and edging material. At least I think it's edging material. Right now we can walk through the front door, although it's a challenge, but tomorrow they will probably pour concrete to make the new steps. This wouldn't be quite as much of a problem if our garage door worked, but it's broken, and the new one had to be ordered, so we'll have to walk around to the back door.

Gee, I've spend the weekend sitting at the bedsides of the dying and I'm whining about a little mud.

It's not just the mud, though. We have a certain standard level of chaos in our house: art projects on the counters, newspapers and magazines on the dining room table, piles waiting to go upstairs or downstairs. That's usually OK with me. But now we also have a different kind of chaos in our bedroom, because we got rid of the chairs in there and haven't replaced them yet. So we have a big open space on the floor where random stuff is accumulating, and there's no place to sit except on the bed. Admittedly when we had a chair in the bedroom it was usually covered with stuff, but I could move the stuff to the bed if I wanted to sit in the chair. Now that's not an option, either.

I feel like I don't have any place to go that's a comfortable and serene space where I can simply relax. I usually feel good when I pull into the driveway. The gardens are pretty, and the lights are on, and I know my family is waiting for me. And even if things are messy inside that's OK. Now I'm busy and more stressed at work, and coming home just makes me feel overwhelmed.

It's because I've spent the weekend sitting at the bedsides of the dying that I'm whining about the mud. I need to create a space - even if it's only a chair - where I can sit and simply be, without feeling as if I should jump up and tidy something. I don't want or need the house to be completely free of clutter, which is good because that's just not going to happen. But the next step in renovating or redecorating is going to be our bedroom, and in the meantime I'm going to get a nice light to go next to my favorite big blue chair in the living room, and I'm going to spend some time each day curled up there with a book, or even with this computer. Some time just for me, to breath in and out and focus on something besides the chaos.

A day in the life ~ by Jay

6:30: Start out bleary-eyed because I haven't been sleeping well, due to a combination of work stress, anniversaries of deaths and losses and the usual surge of depression I get when it starts to get dark. Choose to avoid any battles so do not challenge the child who is wearing wooden-soled sling-back clogs on a rainy day. Remember to pull meat out of freezer so we'll have something for dinner, eat breakfast, manage to find clean clothes, head out to drop off kid on time.

8:30: Pouring rain, lousy traffic, so now I'm late, and I HATE being late. Biweekly meeting at hospice which lasted a full 30 minutes longer than the usual two hours due to a) lots of new admissions b) lots of deaths c) multiple complex family situations, including two separate families in which the daughters refuse to allow us to give appropriate pain medications to the patients. This is very difficult for the nurses who see these families, and neither daughter is available to meet with me any time soon.

11:00: Go into the hospice office to talk with staffer I've known for four years, just back at work after being diagnosed with widespread cancer, primary unknown. She doesn't want to talk about it. Which is good, because I don't think I could talk about it without crying. Do paperwork.

11:15: Go into the medical director's office to discuss something with him and realize he's having a contentious phone call with someone. Leave, go next door to check in with a member of my team who seemed a bit overwhelmed and upset during the meeting. I say "you seem overwhelmed" and she bursts into tears. Tells me that house is being sold out from under her due to divorce and she doesn't feel like she's doing her job well, plus "nurses aren't supposed to cry". Am in midst of this discussion when medical director comes to get me because he only has ten minutes so if I want to talk to him, it has to be now. Leave crying nurse with colleague, return to medical director's office.

11:30: Listen to medical director decompress from call with one of our most unsympathetic colleagues, which is of limited use to him and only makes me more anxious. Resolve my question and then move on to a discussion of the fact that I am not seeing enough patients to justify my position (this is true and not news to me) and he wants to brainstorm possible ways to improve. His suggested approach would require me to work evenings once a week; I already work one evening a week in my office and don't think I can manage another, but this is hard to say to a man who routinely works 12-hour days.

11:45: Return to crying nurse, who is now calmer and says she's fine, and then go find director of support services to make sure that I'm not the only one who knows about crying nurse's issues. Discover that everyone else knows and is checking on her and trying to help her get some time off and/or make some extra money. Phew. What a concept - a team that actually takes care of its members. Which only makes me more concerned about trying to justify my position so I don't have to quit.

12:00: Walk out into pouring rain to drive to office, and decide to take local roads because highway often floods. Unfortunately I haven't driven this route enough to realize that the road leading to my office floods even sooner, and it's closed. Manage to navigate around road closure but 20 minute trip takes 40 minutes which is a problem because my first patient is scheduled at 12:45 and I haven't had lunch.

12:45: Arrive at office to find the predictable pile of paperwork on my desk. Gulp down part of a sandwich while signing off on anything I can do quickly and making sure I at least look at every message or lab result. This of course means I start late.

1:00: See 12:45 patient, who is thank God feeling better and eager to get on her way. Move on to 1:00 patient, who is an elderly man with symptoms suggesting that he had a heart attack sometime last week. Gets severely short of breath stepping up onto the examining table. Refused to go to ER last week when his wife wanted to take him, and says "I don't want to to go the hospital". OK, let's talk about hospice. Except before this he felt good and has been independent, and he might be perfectly fine after two days in the hospital and a change in his medication. He's worried they'll "do too much" at the hospital but isn't really ready for hospice. So we agree that he'll go to the hospital if I can arrange for him to bypass the ER and make sure he doesn't go to the ICU, which I can do by writing a do-not-resuscitate order before he goes and arranging a bed myself. Patient and his wife agree to this. Call admitting to arrange a bed. Call the cardiologist to explain what I've negotiated; he's hesitant until he looks at the patient's date of birth (before 1920) and then he agrees. Call hospitalist who will see the patient. Write orders.

1:30 (yes I did all that in 30 minutes, but visit was only supposed to last 15): See next patient who finally agrees to antidepressant/antianxiety medication after suffering with symptoms of depression, anxiety and OCD for over a year, since her mother died suddenly and her husband lost his job.

1:45: See new patient listed on my schedule as "needs school physical". Child is 14 and healthy. Breathe sigh of relief until I hear family story: divorce, custody battle, school issues, stepparent issues, kid clearly at risk for a variety of bad things. Toss parent out of room to interview kid alone which confirms my concerns about risks. Do my best to get them connected with appropriate resources. Fill out only half of school form because I don't have any immunization records since previous custodial parent has refused to release medical info to current custodial parent.

{Next patient needs a Pap smear but previous patient is still sitting in the only room that has stirrups. Take advantage of delay, run back to my desk, have another bite of sandwich, sign off four new prescription refills and a folder of correspondence, drink the first liquid I've had since my cup of coffee at 6:45 AM.}

2:40: Patient here for a Pap smear is having pain just like the pain she had when she had a previous ovarian cyst. Sure enough, her left ovary is enlarged and tender. I doubt it's anything serious but as I write up the order slip for the ultrasound we're both thinking "what if it's cancer?". It's probably not, but the worry is there.

2:20: 3 week follow-up. The good news: her blood sugars are a bit better on the new insulin and she's lost four pounds. The bad news: she's decided to tell me that she's not sleeping as well as she's said before; in fact she often sleeps only two hours a night. Isn't taking medication previously prescribed for depression and isn't sure she wants to take it. Also reveals that daughter has stopped speaking to her and has forbidden her to see her three grandchildren, children for whom she provided regular care for five years and whom she has frequently referred to as "my reason for living". Adjust medication, help her agree to actually take it, refer to therapist, assess for suicide, and oh yeah check on her diabetes and blood pressure and cholesterol medication as well as do her annual foot exam which is three months overdue.

3:00: I should be finished; I need to leave the office by 3:30 in order to pick up my daughter for tap class. Still have one patient. Ask my staff to go look through the charts and messages that have accumulated since I checked my desk twenty minutes ago, identify anything I really need to deal with today and have it ready when I come out of the exam room.

Go in to see my last patient, who is here because she had another life-threatening episode of low blood sugar. As always, she is furious at everyone: her husband, who called 911; the paramedics who responded; the ER docs who saw her; me for not predicting this problem when she stopped the insulin pump six weeks ago; her insurance company for refusing to pay for a replacement for the pump she accidentally dropped into the bathtub. Blood sugars now behaving quite well and she feels fine but I need to report her to the DMV, who will take away her license. This does not make her less angry.

3:30: Review two lab results that lead to medication adjustments as well as four other messages that I don't have time to deal with now. Pile those charts along with the charts for all the patients I've seen into my rolling storage crate; pick up my purse and my computer bag and head out to pick up my daughter. Leave at 3:45, which should be enough time. Barely. Talk to Sam en route to confirm that he is planning to cook dinner and that he managed to go home during the day and put the meat in the refrigerator, since we both forgot about it and left it on the counter in the morning. Whine to Sam about my day.

4:15: Arrive at my daughter's daycare to discover that they are having a surprise class with a local cheerleading coach. My daughter is taking this class in her completely inappropriate sling-back wooden-soled clogs, the ones I decided not to argue about this morning. Plus it's cheerleading and we know my opinion about that. Remove daughter from gym without being overly rude to the staff, tell her I don't think we can let her wear those shoes to school any more, tolerate sulk in back seat until we arrive at tap dancing class. Drop her off and go home to start writing the notes and return the messages I didn't get to before as well as answer the pages that start at about 4:30, since I'm on call. Decide to blog instead because I need to clear my head.

Phew.

In which the scales drop from my eyes ~ by Jay

When I was in college, I was one of those I'm-all-for-equality-but-don't-call-me-a-feminist women. And, like Mary, I figured equality had been taken care of already. After all, there I was attending a fancy university that had been all-male until about 10 years before I entered, and was now 25% female. Never mind that my science classes became steadily more male-dominated as I progressed, or that my two roommates who studied engineering were often the only women in their classes, or that many of the men on campus were still reluctant to date the women they went to school with, preferring the more docile girls from all-female colleges nearby. I must have known all of that, but I didn't think about it much. For one thing, I didn't enjoy the company of women. I was far more comfortable around men. Women were catty, backbiting, superficial and obsessed with their appearance. Why would I choose to hang around the women's center when I could be the only woman on a crew building sets, or painting flats, or running lights in the theater?

That lovely oblivion lasted until I started my third year of medical school. In a traditional program, the first two years are spent in the classroom and the last two are spent in the hospital. My first rotation, July of my third year, was obstetrics and gynecology. And I did something really stupid. I chose to go to a Catholic hospital. I wasn't thinking about abortion and birth control; I was thinking about the location of the hospital, in a funky artsy part of the city where a bunch of my friends lived. Wow, summer in the city. Sounded like fun to me. It never occurred to me that I would end up working with pregnant 13-year-olds and be forbidden to talk to them about taking the pill, or that a few years into the AIDS epidemic, in a place known for its gay population, I wouldn't be able to to counsel my patients about condoms.

But that wasn't even the worst part. A week or so into the rotation, we had a lecture from the chair of the department about taking a history, and he made it clear that our job was to assume the patient was lying. I know now that this attitude is pervasive in medicine, and not limited to women patients, but at the time I assumed people told the truth and was taken aback to hear him suggest otherwise - and of course his patients were all women. So what he said, almost verbatim, was "never believe what a woman tells you". And we all wrote it down, good little med students that we were.

From then on I noticed how the women were treated: scolded for their dietary transgressions, assumed to be either stupid or immoral or both, occasionally lied to, routinely ignored when they asked for pain medication. I saw the scars of abuse, physical and emotional, for the first time. I watched the staff defer to the male partners rather than the patient when decisions needed to be made. And I started to feel angry. One day I picked up a book from the department library. It included a review of state regulations governing OB practice. I read through part of it and realized that at the time it was published - about 8 years before I was reading it in the mid-1980s - in that state, it was illegal to perform a tubal ligation unless two physicians signed a statement that further pregnancy would render the patient insane or terminally ill. This law was repealed after I entered college, when I thought equality was a done deal. There was never any such legislation governing vasectomies.

By the end of the two month rotation, I had stopped accepting what the attendings said about patients. I was carrying condoms in my pocket to give out surreptitiously. And I'd started calling myself a feminist. I realize now that I also saw racism and classism along with the misogyny. That was my radicalizing experience. Someone once told me that women become feminists to fight on behalf of their daughters. I claimed my feminism to fight on behalf of my patients.

How I Became a Feminist~by MPJ

"Woman is the n*gger of the world" ~John Lennon

One of my blogging friends recently asked me (along with a group of blogging women I'm part of) whether or not I was a feminist and why. Answering the first part of the question was easy: yes. I decided that answering the second part would require its own blog post...

For me, being a feminist means two things:

• Believing that women are pervasively discriminated against, judged to be and made to feel less than men. It doesn't matter whether this is done intentionally or completely unconsciously and unintentionally.
• Believing that men and women should have equal opportunities (which does not mean equal treatment), that the current unequal situation is unjust and therefore requires change.
  

When I was growing up, back in high school and in college, I simply didn't accept the first part of that premise, that women were seen as anything other than equal. I remember the first time I read The Feminine Mystique when I was in high school back in the 80's; I thought, "How quaint. Good things times aren't like that anymore." I didn't understand what contemporary feminists were still bitching about. Women had equal opportunities now. In fact, women (and minorities) often got special preferences, didn't they? (That's what all the white men in my life, people like my dad and my boyfriend, told me anyway.) If we weren't getting ahead, it's just because we weren't smart enough or strong enough or working hard enough. Wasn't discrimination a thing of the past? And then there was all the political correctness: worrying about things like what language people used and whether or not he or she was used in a sentence. Weren't things like that just a petty, stupid waste of time?

What changed my mind was not an experience with gender at all, it was an experience with race. I'm a white woman, married to a black man. Back before we had kids, when my husband was a grad student, he and I spent a day in a major American city. We had some separate errands to run but made plans to meet again that evening. I was at the scheduled meeting place on time and I waited and I waited and I waited. We didn't have cell phones then; he was a starving grad student and I worked for a non-profit. So, I didn't have any way to contact him, nor he me. He was usually a little late, but as the time ticked on and on, I began to get really worried; my mind was racing, my heart was racing. Where on earth could he be? I was pondering what I ought to do, when he dashed up to me and embraced me like he never wanted to let me go. I was relieved and furious, the way you are when you see that someone you've been worrying hard about is safe and well, but my anger gave way quickly to pure relief in the face of his frenzied explanation.

He had been running late to meet me (of course) and was heading for a bus stop when he saw a bus pull up. He began running to try to catch it, knowing that he would be really late to meet me if he missed it. Suddenly, from behind him, he felt someone grab and push him and heard that person say, "I have a gun! Get on the ground!" It was only after he was on the ground, face down, spread eagle, that he realized the person who was holding him at gunpoint was a police officer.

He was handcuffed and taken to a squad car where his belongings were searched. He found out that an auto body shop in the area had been robbed and the police were looking for a man with a bag of stolen car parts. My husband was carrying a blue backpack filled with graduate level math and science textbooks and was dressed in his usual preppy fare: khaki pants, polo shirt, brown leather shoes, a green jacket I bought him from LL Bean or Eddie Bauer or some such. The police were looking for a thief six inches taller than my husband, carrying a red duffel bag full of stolen auto parts, wearing a blue jacket, jeans and sneakers. I'll bet you can guess the one feature my husband did have in common with the thief: he was black. And he happened to be running to catch a bus on a street a few blocks from the auto body shop.

After opening my husband's backpack, the police quickly realized they had the wrong person, and released my husband from handcuffs while they checked his ID. After they confirmed his identity and lack of a criminal record, they apologized for the mix up and drove him to meet me.

And holding the hand of my trembling husband as he told me about being held at gunpoint for running while black, it all came crashing in on me: how he had to live with this every day of his life, the constant stress, the constant threat of violence. His family had left the inner city; his dad had struggled to move them to the suburbs and ensure that his son received a good education. My husband had received an undergraduate education at a highly prestigious university and was pursuing a graduate degree at an equally prestigious institution. In his dress, speech and habits, fit firmly in with the upper middle class kids we found ourselves thrust in among in college. But he would always be black, and to people who didn't know him, who didn't see the degrees hanging on his wall, that would almost always (often unconsciously) mean something negative and even dangerous.

Some part of me knew that black people were discriminated against, but somehow I thought my husband's education and new socio-economic class put him beyond that, somewhere among educated, liberal people who would judge him on his character and his performance, rather than the color of his skin. Somehow I believed that the fact that I could kick the academic and intellectual asses of most men I knew put me in a different league too.

But then I started paying attention, for the first time in my life. I watched as men interrupted and contradicted me as I was explaining some nuance of baseball (a game I know and love well) to my husband (who is more of a volleyball guy), because women don't understand baseball. I thought about the books I read as a child, where the female characters were only there to play a love interest to a man, and how in my daydreams, I cast myself that way: as the sidekick, not the hero. I watched the way men at work would assume I couldn't turn on a computer, when I had run a network and written code for websites and databases. I saw myself getting paid less for the same job men did.

And in the same way that I recognized the weight of race my husband carried, I saw I was carrying the weight of gender. I had lived my whole life with it and hadn't seen it. I hadn't felt as subtle layers were added over the years. But now I know that it's there, and once you know, how can you feel it is anything but unjust? And how can you not want to do something to change that?

To the Searchers ~ by Jay

The Internet is a great place, isn't it? You may have found us from an Google or Yahoo or AOL search, and I can tell how you got here. Spooky.

Since I posted about the woman who said "my husband won't let me", I've noticed a disturbing trend in the referrals from searches. Each day there are three or four of you who land here because you've searched on a string like "should I have to ask my husband for an allowance" or "my husband won't let me have friends" or "stay at home no money controlling husband". I really shouldn't be surprised, but I have been - surprised, saddened, worried about you. I can't help each of you individually. I wish I could. Please know that each of you, yes, even you over there, is a valuable and talented individual with something to offer the world. No matter what he says. You have a core of strength still in there that no one can take away, but it can be very hard to find it on the dark days.

Getting out of a controlling or frankly abusive situation isn't easy. It takes planning and support. You can't do it alone. Many of you have friends and family who have noticed the situation and would like to help but don't know how. They're waiting for you to give them some guidance and they can provide invaluable support. If you can't think of anyone to talk to in your real life, or if they don't help, check out this site. Don't dismiss those resources just because the page is labeled "domestic violence" and he isn't actually hitting you; the organizations listed can help you figure out what you can do. If you're wondering whether your relationship is abusive, look here for help. Once you've explored these sites, you probably want to erase your cookies and empty your cache so the next person who uses your computer doesn't know where you've been online. If you don't know how to do that, email me and I'll help you figure it out.

The other search string that shows up every day is some variant on "can someone tell if I had an abortion". I've already written about this; it's not immediately evident to a doctor. There is no such thing as post-abortion syndrome, but any loss leads to grief and everyone deals with grief differently. If it would help, please feel free to share your stories anonymously in the comments, and know that here, at least, you will be heard and not judged. Your decision, your reaction, your situation is unique. We're all doing the best we can. You deserve space to explore your own emotions without being sucked into a patriarchal political morass.

And one more thing: all of you who are looking for that shampoo commercial? If you find the actual film online, please let me know. I'd love to link to it.

Back to the reading meme ~ by Jay

So back at the beginning of the week, I started to respond to the reading meme Mary tagged me with. I got stuck at the "how many books?" question and then life intervened - although life is always there, and if I'd really wanted to I could have responded sooner. I've found this really challenging. Which completely surprised me, because I am so consumed by reading and by books. I usually have at least two books going at once, and often more than that. I read in the bathroom; I read in between appointments at work; I have been known to read at red lights. I'm not afraid of flying, but I am terrified of being on a plane with nothing to read. I usually take at least four books for a cross-country flight. Sam was pretty annoyed with me when we flew from California to Europe and he had to carry my bag. If I don't have a book with me and I'm out running errands, I won't stop for lunch because I don't have anything to read. So how hard could it be to toss out some answers about reading?

Turns out, as I think about this, that it's the reading that matters to me more than the books. I read for distraction, for escape, for comfort. I read to avoid thinking. I read to keep from realizing that I'm alone. Reading is often characterized as an introvert's activity; I'm anything but an introvert, and reading makes me feel as if there's always someone else here with me. Owning books that I love is a guarantee of good company any time I want it.

I've read my share of "serious" books, of course. I was an English/American studies major in college. I've read Faulkner and John Barth and Dickens and Margaret Atwood and Virginia Woolf and Shakespeare. I wrote my senior thesis on Eugene O'Neill. But that's not what I read now. Real books are too much like real life. They're full of death and loss and misunderstandings and obnoxious people. Mary will be horrified to read this, but I couldn't finish "Wuthering Heights" because Heathcliff just seems like such a nasty man. There wasn't anyone in that book that I wanted to spend time with. I didn't find him romantic; I found him remote, brutal and repulsive. I have to deal with brutality in my own life, far more than I'd like. I don't want to go home and read about it.

Even thought I couldn't finish "Wuthering Heights", I'd like to finish this meme. It's been fascinating to think about.

Last book read? "The Ever-Running Man", by Marcia Muller. Did I mention I read a lot of mysteries? Muller's Sharon McCone series is one of my favorites. I've been reading it since the first book, Edwin of the Iron Shoes, appeared in 1977. Before Muller, hard-boiled mysteries were written by men and they featured male protagonists and had mostly male readers. Women wrote "cozies" - think Miss Marple or "Murder, She Wrote". Sharon McCone is no Jessica Fletcher. In 1977, she was a 20-something living in San Francisco, working as an investigator for a leftist law firm. She had a boyfriend, a sex life, and family and friends and some difficult relationships. Sharon started out ten years older than I am but since mystery characters don't age as rapidly as we do, she's now about my age or a bit younger. Her life has changed, her family has aged and fractured and re-formed, and that's one of the joys of reading a long-running series like this, at least for me. When a new book comes out, it's like spending a weekend with a dear friend, a friend who only comes through town every year or so. Plus Marcia Muller can write, really write, and her plots are complex but consistent and well-researched.

I can hear you wondering "but she doesn't want to read about brutality and nastiness. Why on earth does she read mysteries? People are murdered in mystery books". I don't read thrillers, which are designed to create fear and anxiety in the reader, and I don't really like "dark" mysteries like those written by Caroll O'Connell. Mysteries are the modern morality play. Questions have answers, puzzles have solutions, and bad guys are almost always punished at the end. Far more satisfying than the tragedies in real life.

Last book bought? "Fabulous Small Jews", by Joseph Epstein. I found it in a lovely independent bookstore while I was traveling last week. If I'm going to read serious fiction, I prefer short stories, and these looked interesting. Epstein's use of language intrigues me. I haven't read it yet, though. I was too busy with Sharon McCone.

Five meaningful books? This is where I get stuck. I can think of lots of books I've loved, but none that I would consider life-changing. I could say "The Great Gatsby", but it wasn't the book so much that changed my life. I read "Gatsby" in high school, along with Fitzgerald's short stories (which are actually much stronger than his novels - they are among the greatest works of American literature). I adored the book, and when my college freshman lit professor told us that Nick Carraway was an unreliable narrator, I was furious. She might as well have insulted my best friend. But the idea eventually opened up a completely different connection to narrative, one that I use every day in my work. I listen to stories all day long, and all my patients are unreliable narrators. That doesn't mean they're lying. It means that they bring their own biases and assumptions to the story, that they tell the story for their own purposes, and that I need to be curious about all that lies behind the story I'm hearing.

Then there's "To Know as We Are Known", by Parker Palmer. Palmer writes about teaching, but his philosophy is broader than any one field. He believes that we best serve our vocations by remaining wholly ourselves and resisting the myriad ways in which we can be divided and weakened by modern life. The book is powerful, but I didn't read it until after I met Parker Palmer at a workshop. I remember listening to him, thinking "this encounter will change my life". It did, although not in any way I could have predicted.

I read lots of books about medicine when I was a kid. This was the 1960s, so the women in those books were all nurses. Cherry Ames and Sue Barton are the ones I remember most clearly. Both series started before or during WW II and reflect the attitudes of the day. They feature a lot of patriarchal tropes. The heroines are beautiful, the men are dashing, the nurses all kowtow to the doctors, and the only fat people are stupid, funny or both. In "Sue Barton, Visiting Nurse", there are all sorts of ethnic stereotypes on view in Sue's patients, with Yiddish, Italian and African-American dialects all rendered phonetically. That's the only book which shows anyone who isn't a WASP, aside from the Greek laundry man and the Italian washerwoman in the first Sue Barton book. But I still love them. Sue and Cherry are independent women. They're smart and brave and they make their own choices. They both leave home, live on their own, thrive on a challenge, and refuse to marry because they want a career. Sue eventually capitulates and marries her doctor, but Cherry is single until the end of her series. There's a real idealism about medicine in these books, too. The doctors and nurses care about the patients. They take their vocation seriously, and they hold themselves to a higher standard than "ordinary people". They are thrilled and awed and humbled by their work. My first aspiration was to be a nurse, in part because I didn't realize I had a choice. I changed my mind at 14 after a few months of hospital work. So I don't wear a starched white apron and a pert cap like Cherry or Sue, but I aspire to the same reverence for my work.

And then there's poetry. I grew up on Robert Frost and e e cummings and Walt Whitman; I read Erica Jong, James Dickey, Richard Brautigan and Ogden Nash. In college, I fell in love with the words of John Donne, George Herbert and Henry Vaughn as well as Theodore Roethke and Jane Kenyon. I wrote poetry until I started medical school, and then gave up both writing and reading it until that workshop with Parker Palmer when I was in my 30s. Since then I've discovered Billy Collins, Marge Piercy, William Stafford, Mary Oliver and Naomi Shihab Nye. Simply knowing that even terrible events can be turned into beauty, into meter and flow and rhyme and assonance, makes the world more bearable for me.

If I had to choose one poem, it would the one that brought me back to poetry that week in 1996 when I met Parker Palmer. He introduced me to Mary Oliver, but it was another participant who read "What the Doctor Said", by Raymond Carver. I'll end with the text of that poem, which shows me the power of language both in daily encounters and in art.

What The Doctor Said


He said it doesn't look good
he said it looks bad in fact real bad
he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before
I quit counting them
I said I'm glad I wouldn't want to know
about any more being there than that
he said are you a religious man do you kneel down
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help
when you come to a waterfall
mist blowing against your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I'm real sorry he said
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said something else
I didn't catch and not knowing what else to do
and not wanting him to have to repeat it
and me to have to fully digest it
I just looked at him
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who'd just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may have even thanked him habit being so strong

A bit less worried ~ by Jay

You all are great to worry with me. Bernadette called my office and left a message about an hour ago to tell me she was OK. I plan to check in with her tomorrow, since OK for now may not be OK for long, but I'm relieved to know that the initial encounter is over, she's still in her home, and he's not.

She does have neighbors, friends and nearby family who are aware of the situation, a therapist and a lawyer who are also supportive, and the number of the local DV hotline.

And she's better off than many women in this circumstance: she's a working professional with her own income, her own credit and the house in her name. Two of her kids are grown and on their own, so she doesn't have to figure out how to care for small children in a shelter. She didn't have to walk away from everything she owns, and everyone she loves, to escape. At least not yet.

Worried ~ by Jay

I shouldn't be blogging at work, but the patient scheduled at 11:30 didn't show up and when I sat down to write a couple of notes, I was too distracted to concentrate. Bernadette's walking into a lion's den.

Bernadette came in this morning for a follow-up appointment. She looked pale and tired but determined. She's spent the last year waiting for the moment to come when she'd have to tell her husband she wanted a divorce. The last time she went against his wishes was 2005, when she traveled to another state to visit her daughter's new baby, Bernadette's first grandchild. Her husband thought the trip would be a waste of money; Bernadette took half her paycheck for two months and deposited in a separate account, bought the ticket and went anyway. She came to see me a week after she returned. She had adorable pictures and a frightening story.

It seems that while she was away, something happened to the door in her bedroom. It had been repaired and repainted, but her husband said nothing about it. It was one of his buddies who asked if she thought it was funny that he'd put his foot through the door. Bernadette was sure he'd actually destroyed the door in rage when he realized she'd followed through on her plan.

Since that episode, she's met with a lawyer; she's opened her own bank account and gotten copies of all their financial records, which she has put at a friend's house. They've gone to marriage counseling, but she doesn't think anything is fundamentally changed. Last week he screamed at their daughter for an hour about homework. Bernadette came in today and told me she was on her way home to tell him she wanted him to leave the house.

What if he refuses to leave? Oh, she said, I can push him a bit and make him mad enough to justify calling the cops, and then he'd have to leave. Plus I already took all the bullets out of the house. I tried to talk her out of it; I suggested she take someone with her, have the conversation in public, leave the house herself. Her lawyer has told her that leaving isn't in her best interests, and I'm sure that's true. But I'm worried about her survival.

I could write a lot about domestic violence, about the statistics and the ways in which the American myth of family and self-determination support smacking women around, about the myriad ways in which the women I know are abused and battered even when he doesn't lift a finger. But I don't have enough brain left for that right now. I'm too worried about Bernadette.

My Husband's Dad Passed Away

I know (once again), I haven't been blogging here much. I wanted to share a post from my personal blog, to let you all know what has been going on in the life of this second woman blogging...

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We lost Mark's dad this weekend to lung cancer, just five weeks after we learned of the diagnosis. I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't know that he's in a better place now. I do know that he's no longer in pain: not in the physical pain that ended his life, nor in the mental and spiritual pain he lived his life with.

But I do believe in a kind of reincarnation, a version of karma: not a literal version, but a metaphoric one. I believe that we live on, in our beauty and our baseness, through our children. And we lead good lives not in the hope that we will reap the rewards, but that they will start off a little ahead, a little healthier, a little more spiritual, or in some cases just a little less neglected and abused than we were.

My father-in-law's sins may have been visited on his son; the son is, like the father was, an addict. But my husband reaped the rewards of his father's triumphs; my father-in-law's struggles, however misguided at times, to better himself have borne fruit in his son's wise mind, caring heart and dedication to recovery. My husband is a good man, who is becoming a better, more beautiful man every day, and that's the most meaningful tribute I think his father could ever have.

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Mark is away at his father's funeral now. I hope to return to Two Women Blogging after he returns next week.

She must be kidding ~ by Jay

Mary posted a meme on her blog and tagged me. It requires counting my books. That's the first question: total number of books.

She must be kidding.

I'm sitting in the dining room. There are some (maybe 3?) books in the cubby baskets waiting to go upstairs. There are four library books in the tote bag I brought home today. Do those count? There are two small shelves of cookbooks - total about 10. There's a field guide to insects and two books on education (Sam's pile, on the kitchen counter). There's the pile of new Scholastic books behind me that came home from school while I was gone. That's the dining room, people. We don't keep books in the dining room.

In the living room: the two full shelves of limited-edition and first-edition Eugene O'Neill plays, plus a set of the Wilderness Edition. A small revolving bookcase mostly full of cookbooks; one other shelf of cookbooks; several collectible cookbooks displayed on other shelves. The shelf of large-format art books. The half-shelf of photography books.

In the playroom: ten shelves of nature and science books, gardening books, random non-fiction and other stuff that wandered in there. One shelf of old (1880-1920) books inherited from my grandmother, mostly English fiction and poetry.

Moving upstairs.

In our bedroom: one tall bookcase with a whole bunch of random stuff - our yearbooks, our wedding album (is that a book?), more large-format books that don't fit downstairs, several books on adoption I haven't read yet, some poetry books I didn't reshelve in the right place, a few of the Beany Malone books that wandered out from their location, the Sue Barton series that I bought from Alibris as a treat last year. A smaller bookshelf, a relic from college, with mostly non-fiction. The glass-fronted bookcase with Judaica, including several different translations of the Torah and Prophets, lots of collections of criticism and interpretation, ten or so different Haggadot, a set of My People's Prayerbook, and one of my favorites, The Nakedness of the Fathers. Plus a bunch of paperback mysteries I shoved in there when I was cleaning up. Another small bookcase with random stuff, much of it Sam's and unknown to me.

In our daughter's room: a Levenger bookbox crammed full of picture books, Betsy books, Ramona books, and princess/dragon books.

In the hall: a tall bookcase with books that don't fit anywhere else. Two copies of "The Phantom Tollbooth" because I forgot I already ordered one, and I can't wait for my daughter to want to read it.

In the study: the remaining Judaica, plus software manuals. Why do we still have those? We Google everything anyway.

In the guest room: two large bookcases with the collection of poetry, my English and American lit books from college, the rest of the Beany Malone books, a set of Cherry Ames books from my mother-in-law, several shelves of paperback mystery and science fiction, a couple of extra Judaica/Holocaust books that really should be moved, lots of collections of comic strips, a few O'Neills that need to go downstairs.

Today I took two big bags of books to the library. In the past ten years, I have gotten rid of all my hardback mysteries (over 100 books alone) and most of the paperback fiction, as well as a lot of non-fiction that I was never going to re-read. I now rarely purchase fiction unless it's paperback for book club or for travel, and I donate it when I'm done. All my professional material is in my office. This doens't count the magazines, either.

More than 1,000. Fewer than 10,000. About 60% of what we owned 10 years ago. That's as close as I'm going to get tonight.

I'll finish this tomorrow, or I'll do more of it tomorrow, but all I have to say now is she must be kidding.