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WOMEN in a MAN'S WORLD, CRYING
Essays
By Vicki Covington The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2002 Vicki Covington
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8173-1159-9
Chapter One
Women in a Man's World, Crying * * *
I live on a cul-de-sac. I love my neighbors. Among the seven of us women, there are two lawyers, three teachers, a nurse, and a writer. Together, we have seventeen children. The other night the women were gathered around a kitchen table for a neighborhood supper. I said, "I'm curious. How many of you have cried sometime during the past forty-eight hours?"
Every single one admitted she had.
Granted, we are in varying states of hormonal flux-some pregnant, some lactating, others premenopausal. Plus, we are in varying states of career flux-most of us part-time. But hormones and work aside, I think it's interesting that, on a given night in August, we'd all cried during the past two days.
We are the daughters of the post-World War II American dream. Many of us wanted to be like our fathers us much as our mothers. We wanted to be boys. We wanted to be men. We wanted the symmetry of men: the skin, the bones, the dreams.
We accomplished this metamorphic feat. Briefcases replaced aprons. Credit cards, black suits, power, frequent flyer miles, and heart disease befit us. All went fine. We had become ourfathers just as we'd planned, and history was in the making.
Then we got pregnant. And no matter how you look at it, no matter how you want to deny it, no matter how badly you want androgeny, only women can make eggs, labor, give birth, and lactate. And no matter how good the fast lane felt, this other stuff made us higher.
In her book, Motherhood Deferred, Anne Taylor Fleming grieves her infertility that resulted from postponing having a child. Fleming, a New York Times journalist, says that the women's movement isn't responsible for her plight, but she can't help but study what it did to her life. In her case, the idea of women having it all simply didn't work. In many ways, her story is our collective story: the '60s and '70s, the sexual revolution, the empty womb, oh to swap a byline for a baby.
In an essay called "Despising Our Mothers, Despising Ourselves," Orania Papazoglou says, "You cannot devalue motherhood without devaluing everything else women do. You cannot train a whole generation of women in contempt for their mothers without training them in contempt for themselves."
Feminism, at one time, seemed to have contempt for motherhood. We were young then, and we started running from motherhood. We're still running from it, but now with kids on our backs. "You've got to be more than a mother," we're hollering back to them as they clutch us, struggling to hold on to their crazed mamas. I know they want us to stop. They know we can't. We think we're doing this for them, and perhaps we are. We'd like to think we're good role models. They see the dust we've stirred up, but they also smell the anxiety.
One of my neighbors, a lawyer, tells the story of how she got up one morning to take a 5:50 flight to Atlanta. She was going to Florida to get a case ready for trial. At home were two daughters, one sick and the other with a broken arm. She went to her office in the gray light of daybreak, collected her papers, and went to the airport. There, she met her partner and put her briefcase in his hand. "Go," she told him. "I can't." She cites this as the turning point. She wanted her life back.
Once, I dashed into a deacons' meeting at my former church. Here, I was one of four women in a male world. It was six o'clock, and the men were sitting calmly in their three-piece suits. I was in cut-offs and a T-shirt, having just tossed a mess of spaghetti on my kids' plates and rushed off, with them yelling after me, "I wish you weren't a deacon. It's stupid!" As I took a chair in the back and held the financial report upside down, I thought to myself, "The kids are right." It was the same when I'd walk into the downtown Rotary Club where women are a particularly noticeable minority. I'm thinking, "Nobody knows what I went through this morning to get here. I'm a fake. This is a joke." All my life I wanted to be in a man's world. They've let me in. And all the time I'm with them, I'm wanting to be back home. I'm wanting to be a woman again.
And so it goes for us.
I had a dream recently. In it, I saw what I thought was a deer, or maybe an antelope: black, charred, in an old barbeque pit. I kept saying to myself, this can't be born of a woman. But it was. For weeks, I kept wondering what this animal was. I looked at pictures of animals. Was it a deer, stag? No, not quite. Antelope? No. Moose? No. Finally, I forgot about it until my daughter brought me a National Geographic book on animals. "Look at these," she said. My heart started racing. It was a herd of wildebeests, hundreds of them, stirring up a dust storm, galloping across Africa's Serengeti Plain. "These were in my dream!" I cried. "This is it. They're the deer, the antelope, the burned animals in my dream." More than a million wildebeests migrate together every year, the book said. Eight hundred miles. The long trip tests the wildebeest's skill as a swimmer, a runner, a survivor. If it weakens or slows down, it will be in trouble. It can't stop running. It can't. It's on fire.
So are we. We have chosen to run. It's too late to rethink things. Sure, we can cut back on work, go part-time, flex the schedule, be home by three o'clock, or quit altogether. But the die is cast all the same. We are, as Emmylou Harris sang, "Born to run." We are our fathers' daughters, living in a man's world, in a woman's body, at war with nature.
It's no wonder we're gathering around a kitchen table, asking each other what's wrong and why it is we can't stop crying.
Chapter Two
The Girls' Locker Room * * *
When I was growing up, I was always curious about the concept of the boys' locker room. In my mind it was a wet, grungy, towel-popping mixture of athletics and tall tales.
I'd heard they talked about girls there, and I hoped I wasn't one of them. It seemed that nothing good could come out of the boys' locker room. There was also a girls' locker room in high school, but it was just a place to hide and be quiet and curse the ugly dark green gymsuits.
Decades would pass before I'd discover a real women's locker room. I started lap swimming at my neighborhood Y three years ago. The walls there are painted pink. The showers are spick-and-span clean. Fans cool the place. Nevertheless, this is a basic Y, not a health club or fancy spa, and I like it.
I like the drift of conversation-babies, strep, sonograms, bypass, rheumatism, broken bones, hope. Modesty, I've noted, is inversely proportionate to age. The older you are, the less you need to hide. A body is a story-like a totem pole. And in the women's locker room, the older women have the best stories carved into them. Exposed like this, what can we say other than the fact we are no longer lithe girls, that we've suffered. The naked body tells all: breast cancer, Caesarean, back surgery, lactating, osteoparitic, dying. Everybody's got a scar. I have three. Spine-back surgery. Belly-ectopic pregnancy. Navel-laparoscopy.
When I'm in the locker room, I'm reminded of something I'm afraid women are losing. Layers of business suits, briefcases, and email have robbed us of intimacy.
My grandmother helped deliver her friend's baby. Can you fathom literally putting your hands up into a neighbor's womb to bring a child into the world? Women used to apply poultices to one another's chests, fan each other's faces, use their hands to make quilts. I'm not merely lamenting the loss of rural life. I'm saying we are losing something that is still within reach of retrieving, that is worth retrieving.
That thing is vulnerability. In the drive to be men, we have become like them in ways that even they would warn us against. We are cool, distant, business-like, and afraid to touch each other. My neighbor is nine months pregnant, and when I see her in the street, I run outside. I want to cradle her belly, to run my fingers over the taut material of her maternity dress, to be physically near her.
The neighborhood kids cluster nearby, listening for the sounds they rarely hear anymore: women talking about earthy things. I asked my daughter the other day if she preferred listening to men or women talk, and she said, "It's all the same." I asked what adults talk about, and she said, "Business."
She's right. We all-men and women alike-talk about the business of money and debts and litigation and real estate and book contracts and meetings and deadlines and hiring and firing and what's lucrative and what's selling and what's not. Maybe this is interesting to children, but if that's so, why do they only close in for eavesdropping when the conversation moves to Miss JoAnne's body-to the rhythms of nature, mystery, women, and the sight of their mothers' hands on a neighbor's belly?
In her book Womenfolks Shirley Abbott remembers her maternal ancestors and the way they peeled peaches into enamel dishpans for mason jar canning, how they'd walk five miles together to arrive at a quilting frame, how they were "carriers and conservators of a culture of their own, one that I would have to unravel one day and reknit."
The culture of women has come unraveled. Some will argue this isn't so. They will say women are merely changing and evolving and that there are choices. But it's hard to argue that we have not lost a hands-on nurturing of one another. We'd rather know one another in a cerebral way. Professionalism has replaced camaraderie. Intellect has replaced love.
I hope we can reknit what we've had to take apart. When I'm in the women's locker room, I feel hopeful that we can piece together a fabric worth passing to our daughters.
Chapter Three
Her Breast * * *
I have five friends who've had breast cancer.
One of them is Karon Bowdre. I heard her speak today to the Christian Legal Society. Afterward, I asked her if I could write about her. She paused. I thought she was going to say no. She said, "OK. But don't make me out to be a saint, because I'm not one."
So, for the record: Karon's not a saint.
She's a mother, a lawyer. She marks time from October 4. That's when she first knew of her cancer. During this brief period of time, she's had surgery, breast reconstruction, and some chemotherapy.
I ran into her at the Y-I guess it was two weeks ago. She let me see her body. Frankly, I was stunned with the beauty of reconstructive surgery. I felt privileged to be a witness to it. I loved it that she so literally "let me in."
And when I found out she was speaking today, I knew I had to go.
When I entered Dining Room A of the South Central Bell Building, Karon rose. She was wearing a stylish navy blue hat with a red scarf. Naively, I thought, "A hat. She looks good in a hat. Have I ever seen her in a hat?" Didn't dawn on me that she was in the midst of chemotherapy-hence, the hat.
She talked first about the fact that one in eight women will have breast cancer, that ten thousand women die of it every year. She talked about the fact that she doesn't fit any kind of preconceived profile: she's not yet forty; there's no family history. Yet, she says, 60 percent of women with breast cancer have no family history. She talked, too, about how a tumor exists and grows for many years before it can be picked up on mammogram, how it will take even more years before the hand can detect it.
Then she talked about her spirituality. But it was what she said about the physical details of her cancer that I can't forget. It was her hair. What it's like to lose it. Her confession that losing this, her point of vanity, was tough (she has gorgeous blond hair).
In her book My Breast, Joyce Wadler talks in very physical terms of getting to see her tumor, how it was the size of a robin's egg, and how she looked at it hard, trying to figure it out. "We did not know it was cancer," she says, "until twenty minutes later, when they had almost finished stitching me up and the pathology report came back, and then I was especially glad I had looked. Mano a mano, eyeball to eyeball."
It's hard to look. It's hard to look at your friends and know they've suffered things you can't begin to understand. It's hard knowing that being forty-something carries all kinds of risks.
But it sure wasn't hard looking at Karon. It wasn't hard listening either. It's good to have friends who have been eyeball to eyeball with things like cancer. It's good to know they are there, if you-like them-turn out to be a one in eight.
In his essay "On Bringing One's Life to a Point," Gilbert Meilaender talks about what it's like to be at the height of a pivotal moment in life, and how friends will say to you, Don't worry. It will pass. "But," he says, "the passing of a moment is not the same as taking it up and bringing one's life to a point around it. When the moment passes, life continues, more or less as it had before. But if we take up the moment, accepting a certain kind of death that it brings, we may be renewed-which is quite different from the simple continuation of life."
Karon told me that some friends had advised her against publicly talking about her cancer while it is so fresh. They told her to wait-until after the chemotherapy, until after she's had time to assimilate, until she has healed, is in remission.
But a body in remission, a soul in remission, lacks the passion of the moment. She has chosen to hold up the moment, to take it up, to put it to the light with all its prismatic, uncut edges.
"You've got this radiance," I told her when she finished speaking about her cancer. She didn't deny it. She just told me to go home and read Psalm 34:1-7.
I did.
It's about the light that comes into a person's face when she has been delivered from fear.
Chapter Four
Women in Prison * * *
There's a novel on my shelves called A Home at the End of the World. It's one of many books that I'll probably never get to. Perhaps I bought it because the title grabbed me. I don't know what the writer meant by a home at the end of the world, but last week I discovered where that home is in Alabama.
Last week I visited Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka with photographer Melissa Springer, who's spent the past two years documenting life in this nation of women. Although her series is complete and, in fact, is on exhibit at the Huntsville Museum of Art, she continues her pilgrimage here, bearing fried chicken (meat is a luxury), cloth scraps for quilting, and photographs.
The gate clanged shut and locked itself behind us. We handed the guard our driver's licenses and keys, then passed through another security door. The world opened up-a panoramic corridor of society. Women sat on benches dressed in white, smoking. Clusters of rooms off the main hall were lined with rows of beds. In the lunchroom was a big poster that said, "We can fly straight now!" Over it was a list of inmates who've apparently learned to live without alcohol and other drugs.
We walked on through the big halls until we came to our final destination, the medical isolation unit. In the psychiatric wing, a woman's fingers clutched the bars. Beyond this, we passed into yet another capsule. I knew the minute I stepped inside the HIV ward that we were at the very end of the road. And I knew it was a sacred place. The walls were painted pink. The women rose from the beds to meet in the family room. They encircled Melissa like children.
After the hugs, they sat on the soft-cushioned seats and waited. Melissa had brought a photograph for a woman I'll call Angel. Angel's never seen her baby boy. They were separated at birth. Angel was high on cocaine. Both mother and baby were HIV positive. The baby boy has a foster mother at A Baby's Place in Birmingham. Melissa gave Angel the photograph.
"Thank you, Jesus," Angel said to Melissa.
Angel took me to her house. Her house was a cot, a pink chest-no bigger than a toy box-and the space nearby. "Get out of my house," she fussed to her "neighbor," who lived in the next cot. "And tell Mother to save me some fried chicken." The woman she calls Mother is a fellow inmate-twenty or so years older than Angel. She is the mother of the unit.
Under Angel's bed were a pair of yellow bedroom slippers and a purple comb. Beside her pillow was a modern translation of the New Testament. She took the floral scarf from her dark curls, brushed powder on her ebony skin, and then let Melissa take photographs. Angel was wearing a flimsy white gown. Playfully, she talked about "getting out of this place." But it's the end of her world. Many of these women, who may die in prison, know that they will be paroled upward.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from WOMEN in a MAN'S WORLD, CRYING by Vicki Covington Copyright © 2002 by Vicki Covington. Excerpted by permission.
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