"Let us not be ashamed to speak what we shame not to think."
-Michel de Montaigne

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

OF: The Apocalypse

What shall we do on December 21st when the 13th Baktun, and thus the world as we know it, ends according to the Mayan long calendar?

Shall we drink in anticipation?

Shall we move our families into caves?

Shall we pray?

Shall we do anything at all?

For the record, I do not think that'll happen, but I've always been completely fascinated by apocalyptic literature--particularly the Book of Revelation--ever since I was a young child. Which, in retrospect, makes complete and total sense given the kind of childhood I had.

There is an almost clinical satisfaction in destruction, particularly when it matches our inner turmoil or repressed desires or needs.

What I mean is, there seems to be a fundamental human need to watch/experience/contemplate/enact destruction. I used to think this was because human nature was inherently evil, but I see it now as part of a perpetual, unconscious push for rebirth. Spiritually. Economically. Intellectually. Environmentally.

Meanwhile: things and people die. Meanwhile: whatever was safe, or at least known to us is gone. I used to think that was bad, negative.

Apocalypse (n): from the Latin word apocalypsis meaning "revelation," and before that from Greek word apokalyptein meaning "to uncover, disclose, reveal."

Imagine: apocalypse as knowledge, as revelation, as a great uncovering of Truth. In that way there is joy in destruction, hope in destruction. For Christians, it is the hope of Christ to returning to earth. For Secularists, perhaps, it is the hope of a world free from the historical tyrannies of religion. Perhaps I sound like an idiot, but this all interests me nonetheless.

I've been a woman possessed with thinking about the end. The end of 'US'. The end of U.S. The end of bees and polar bears and the Redwood trees in California and bananas and Alaskan permafrost and ozone and Wall Street and love and debt and potable drinking water and reproductive rights and marriage and American world dominance and racial inequality and income inequality and gender inequality and pandemic diseases and poetry and poetry and poetry. All of it comes to die inside my thoughts these days.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

OF: Raising Girls

A few weeks ago, in the advent of my daughter's fifth birthday, I wandered the aisles of Target trying to decide which pink plastic trinket or other to buy her when hit me like a Mack truck of college-educated, post-women's-lib, feminist guilt: should I be buying my daughter this crap?

By "crap" I mean dolls. Specifically, the princess-y type. Specifically, Disney princess-y stuff that represents, in part, the archetypal garbage I chaff against: doe-eyed, pure-hearted beauties with dead mothers and evil step-hags. Princesses which must be rescued, or married, or made wretched/humiliated/subservient to the cruel world before they can have any scrap of deserved happiness.

Somewhere a Disney marketer is saying MWUHAHAHA.
I felt sick thinking about all the stuff she already had. Things I had either purchased myself or passively allowed others to buy for her. Princess bedspreads. Princess pajamas. Princess movies. Princess books. Princess dolls. Princess puzzles. Princess panties. Princess sippy-cups. It's a pink nightmare I tell you. Where was that parent I swore I would be when Ava was in utero?

I worry about how invested my daughter is in the whole princess thing--and also weddings. Already! At age 5! She came home from school the other day and proclaimed, "Mommy, I've already chosen my husband. I married Casey at school today." Oh dear Lord. OH LORD. I responded by saying jokingly, "We discussed that you can't get married until 40, remember?" The next day, on the way to school, she mentioned something about one day leaving her family to be married and how that would change her life forever and ever. And if she chooses that, it will absolutely change her life...I just...I just don't want her to fall into the idea (consciously or more pervasively--unconsciously adhering to the idea) that being married is the end-all, be-all of a woman's life/identity/existence. I know what a fatal trap that line of thinking is; I often feel completely torn between my sometimes twee ideals of romance and love versus reality/the landscape of human relationships.

I don't have any answers. I have worry. I have (at times) poor execution of my ideals. I want to be a thoughtful, wise, and intentional parent.

I try to make it a point to talk to her about other things that are equally valuable in life: graduating from college, being independent, caring for herself and others, living a life that honors who she is and what she wants. It's not the obsession with pink or princesses that bothers me, it's the long-term baggage that is sometimes attached with the idolatry of that way of being as a woman.

God, I hope this is a phase.

God, I hope I'm doing right by her.

God, I hope Ava is one pink-tiara-wearing, ass-kicking feminist and wife (if she chooses) one day.