Explaining Donald Trump to my Son

March 10, 2016 | Jennifer Berney

Last week I decided it was time to have the conversation. I wasn’t sure my son was ready—he’s only seven after all, but how do you ever know? NPR was on the in van. Commentators were analyzing Donald Trump’s ever increasing viability as they seem to do every hour of every day. As we drove to pick up Smoke’s little brother up from preschool, I sat there weighing the consequences. Should I talk to him about Donald Trump?

I didn’t want to give my kid information that would complicate his life on the playground. I thought about Smoke’s friends at school and the possibility that some of their parents are Trump supporters. From my own childhood, I remember how kids can so easily internalize their parents’ politics, how those politics can divide them from one another long before they truly understand what’s at stake in any given election. I remember how profoundly disorienting it was when, in grade school or middle school or even in high school (hell, maybe still), I learned that a grown-up I respected didn’t see the world in the same way as my parents. I would learn that a teacher was a lifelong Republican, and my brain would hurt trying to figure out how they could be so nice, and yet vote for a person that my parents had told me was the bad guy. Now that I am a parent myself I struggle to identify the line between orienting my kids to my values and indoctrinating them.

But Donald Trump has been haunting my thoughts after sweeping Super Tuesday. On Wednesday I watched this video, where a young African American woman was shoved, pursued, and harassed at one of his rallies, and the image ran on a loop in my mind. When I watch this footage, I see the same flavor of vitriol that I see in old footage from Klan rallies or neo-Nazi parades. It’s not that I thought this brand of blatant racism was dead, but I didn’t expect to see it play out so transparently at the rally of a leading candidate in 2016. I didn’t expect that a candidate who encouraged this would gain traction.

Some months ago a small part of me wanted Donald Trump to win the nomination because I thought it would allow Bernie or Hillary to win by a comfortable margin. But after viewing that video, I saw how wrong I was. Trump’s candidacy has already cost our country greatly; it has legitimized racism and hate. For me Trump has become more than a candidate I wouldn’t vote for—he’s become a cultural force that terrifies me.

I turned the volume down on the radio and said to Smoke, “Do you hear that they’re talking about this guy named Trump?”

“Who is he?” Smoke asked.

“Well, he’s this guy who’s running for president and I think he would make the worst president ever.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Well,” I said, and started in by explaining how a president’s job is to work with other leaders, to listen them to understand their perspectives, to make circumspect decisions to avoid needless war. “But this guy Trump is actually pretty mean. Like if someone disagrees with something he says, he just calls that person a loser.” As I said this I was struck by how literally true it was. “Loser” is Donald Trump’s go-to rebuttal. I wasn’t having to dumb this down at all to get a seven-year-old to understand.

“He sounds awful,” Smoke said. I had parked the car by now and we were walking towards the daycare center. A grin crossed his face. “Well at least no one will vote for him,” Smoke said. It was a logical conclusion, but I couldn’t let him believe it.

“That’s why I’m nervous,” I explained. “I don’t think he will win, but lots of people ARE voting for him. More and more people.”

“Are you voting for him?” Smoke asked me.

“No, I’m voting for anyone but him.”

“You’d vote for anyone but him?”

I thought about this. Certainly there were people out there who were as bad or worse than Donald Trump. I mean there were actual neo-Nazis. But of all the people who would conceivably run a presidential campaign, Trump was at the very bottom of my list. There is a person in my town who runs for City Council every year under the name Prophet Atlantis. I would vote for Prophet Atlantis over Donald Trump in a heartbeat.

When we got home that day, the sun was out and both of my sons wanted to ride their bikes around the block. As they put on their shoes and helmets, Smoke kept asking me questions about Donald Trump and politics. We talked about how women didn’t always have the right to vote, and how neither did black people. We talked about how weird that was, and how stupid that was, and how terrible it would be to move backwards rather than forwards. Stump, my three-year-old, half-listening in the background, did a crazy little dance and chanted “Donald-Trump-Donald-Trump-Donald-Trump.” For a moment I was comforted. One of my sons still knew nothing about Trump’s growing political power. To him Donald Trump was just three meaningless syllables he was hearing way too often.

Image credit: original drawing by Smoke. (Something about it just reminded me of Trump.)

Beloved Strangers

February 22, 2016 | Jennifer Berney

Yesterday, because the sun was out, I took Stump, my three-year-old, to a park we don’t often visit. The playground area was overflowing with kids and parents, and so Stump and I were quick to move on. We moved to the sunny field for a while and then Stump pointed to the tennis courts. No one was actually playing tennis. There was just a sunny court, a few puddles, and a little girl, maybe five years old, whose mother was helping her learn to ride a bike. The moment I opened the tennis court gate, the little girl jumped off her bike and ran to us. For a moment I was confused. Was there someone behind us that she knew? Did she mistake my kid for someone else? But I didn’t have too much time to wonder, because she was already standing beside me, tickling the inside of Stump’s hand with her index finger, and Stump was tickling her back. They stood face-to-face. The little girl began tracing Stump’s forehead with her finger, and he reached up to trace hers as well. Their greeting was at once ceremonial and natural, as if they were beings from a faraway planet, one that had an intimate custom for meeting strangers.

The exchange went on for minutes as they stood there exploring each others’ faces, both of them captivated, smiling. The other mom and I stood on the sidelines laughing, not sure exactly what to do or say—I mean what do you do when your child has fallen so suddenly and utterly in love?

Eventually the little girl ushered Stump into the center of the court where she showed him her bike and invited him to check out her handlebar streamers, which were silver and purple and fluttering. She told him where he could stand while she practiced riding, and then after a few laps around the court, her mother told her it was time to go.

“I’m going to a birthday party,” she explained to my son. “Do you want to come too?”

“Yeah,” Stump said.

“That’s nice of you to invite him,” her mother said. “Do you want to tell your new friend goodbye?”

She embraced him. He returned her embrace. She kissed his cheek. He kissed her back. They were quiet and radiant, wide-eyed and giggling. They kissed each other quickly on the lips (the lips!) and then she stepped away and hopped on her bike. “Wow,” said the little girl’s mother. I shook my head in amazement. My eyes were wet and I could not stop laughing. When they were finally out of sight, Stump looked at me and said, “I want to go to that party.”

The night before, because I couldn’t sleep, I had been lying in bed considering the word beloved. I thought about who was beloved in my life, and a row of faces appeared to me. At first they were the faces you would expect—my children, my partner, my brother. But my pre-sleep brain kept going, kept presenting me with rows upon rows like a stadium, concentric circles of beloveds. I saw the faces of family and friends, colleagues and students, people I’d worked with behind a counter in my twenties, friends I’d made in summer camp and then drifted from. My waking brain was skeptical. Really? I asked myself. All of them? Yes, all of them, my sleep brain replied. And then the rows of beloveds kept expanding until they included everyone on earth. Even Donald Trump? my waking brain asked. Even Donald Trump, sleep brain replied. It made so much sense at the time. Sleep brain took over and I finally drifted off.

There’s this moment in the book Fun Home where the narrator, Alison, is five years old and eating with her father in a diner. A woman—a stranger—walks in wearing a flannel shirt and short hair. She’s delivering boxes on a hand truck. She gets the waiter’s signature and leaves. This is the first butch woman that our narrator has ever seen and she describes the moment this way:

Like a traveler in a foreign country who runs into someone from home—someone they’ve never spoken to, but know by sight—I recognized her with a surge of joy.

When the narrator says “I recognized her,” what she means is that she saw herself in that woman, that the very sight of her opened a door, gave her permission to become a self that she both feared and longed to be (in this case a woman who expresses gender on her own terms). On the next page, the narrator says: “the vision of the truck-driving bulldyke sustained me through the years.”

I keep pausing there. The vision of the bulldyke sustained her. It fed her and kept her alive until a moment in her adult life when she could finally own who she was.

I consider also the “surge of joy” she describes in that moment of recognition, and the surge of joy I felt vicariously for Stump when that young girl greeted him with a wide-open heart. She saw him. He saw her back. Their love filled a tennis court. It filled my whole weekend.

image credit: Sean Connors, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0), https://www.flickr.com/

The Tyranny of Weekends

February 7, 2016 | Jennifer Berney

I have a confession to make. I hate Saturday mornings. I’ve been fooling myself for decades. I thought I loved Saturdays. I spend the workweek dreaming of them, thinking I will wake up rejuvenated and blissful, that I will relish every moment of not having to be somewhere.

Instead I stumble out of bed at six-thirty and feel uncertain. I make my morning tea and my to-do list starts pinging around in my brain. On Friday I was so optimistic. I packed a set of student papers in a folder thinking I could just casually sit around and grade them while my children played. I thought I’d crank out an essay that’s due in ten days. I thought that I would fold all the laundry, do five more loads, prepare my taxes, and defrost the freezer. Small goals, I told myself, and these were the goals I set. But on Saturday mornings I wake up not wanting to grade papers or fold laundry. I don’t want to engage with my to-do list, but to relax would require letting go of the list, and I can’t quite do that either. And so I spend all of Saturday morning trapped between these two places, unable to commit to doing, unable to commit to not-doing.

This week my compromise was to walk the dogs. I thought that the air and movement would help me, that I’d be performing a pleasant but useful task. I was already feeling brighter as I put on my boots; I was getting ready to cure myself. But then Wally, our younger dog jumped all over me with muddy paws and insisted on sniffing my crotch. And then Winnie, our older dog, was shedding his winter coat in giant fluffy tufts. When I bent over to gather some of loose fur, I noticed his coat was oily and matted. He was in dire need of a bath. When I got home, Kellie and I would spend the next two hours cleaning and brushing him—a large chore that neither of us had planned on. Meanwhile, as the children played inside the house, our refrigerator began dying an angry, loud death. The following would become the soundtrack to our weekend as we searched for working refrigerators on Craigslist and tried to deter Smoke and Stump from their usual habit of opening the fridge and just standing there for minutes on end. Listen:

I hope that this is not a woe-is-me post. I hope that this is a life-is-life post. The problem is not my stinky matted dog or my crazy-loud refrigerator or any other spontaneous challenge. The problem is the trouble I have in making space for these challenges. I crowd my weekend with expectations. I make the mistake of thinking I can tame these two days every week, and inside tameness I will find comfort. When the weekend proves untamable I’m mad at myself, and mad at life.

Sundays are often a little better. This morning I left the death-rattle of the refrigerator behind me and went for a run. The sun was out. I ran through the woods. I jumped over puddles and brooks—everything was wet from the rains we’ve had this week. It was nice to be outside, but dread still nestled in my sternum. On the last mile of my run, when I was back on the pavement, I spotted a tiny plastic dinosaur that some child must have dropped while on a walk. I backtracked to pick it up. I thought about bringing it home to my kids—because if there’s anything my household needs it’s one more tiny plastic toy. I had no pocket, and so as I ran, I held its tail between my thumb and forefinger.

Here’s a funny thing about that dinosaur. My mood instantly lifted. It’s hard to take yourself too seriously when you’re wearing green spandex and holding a tiny t-rex. The longer I ran with the t-rex in my hand, the more I saw him as the angst that had been ruling me, a tiny monster inside who thinks he’s more important that he is. Now that I held him in my hand, I could see him as a small and ridiculous thing. I could get some space, some vantage. I could put him on the shelf and walk away.

When I came home, both of my kids instantly noticed the dinosaur in my hand. “Is that mine?” Stump asked me. “No, it’s mine,” told him. “Can we have it?” Smoke wanted to know. I told them they couldn’t. I need it.

Riot Grrrl in a Minivan

November 9, 2015 | Jennifer Berney

Last Thursday, as I was walking through a rainy parking lot, I spotted a bumper sticker that read Reelect Obama, 2012. I smiled at first, because I thought it was a joke—that 2012 was the year of our next election, and that the owner of the car was suggesting we elect Obama for a third term instead of Hillary or Bernie. Then I did the math, and realized that we’re approaching 2016.

Every day I do math like this. How old am I again? 38. How long has it been since I graduated high school? 20 years. But hasn’t it been just two years since my fifteenth class reunion? No, that was actually five years ago.

Huh, is my internal response every single time. I remain unconvinced. I don’t quite feel twenty anymore, but I’m not sure how I arrived at middle age, and so I keep looking around, befuddled, trying to get my bearings.

My past has been haunting me extra hard this month, and for some reason it keeps taking the form of Carrie Brownstein. Maybe it’s because she has a new book out and so she’s everywhere—she’s on Fresh Air with Terry Gross; she’s on a book tour of major cities. If you don’t know Carrie Brownstein, I’m not quite sure how to introduce you, except to say that plenty of queers like me spent a chunk of our youths standing in line and then pushing through crowds to be near her, to watch as she played guitar next to Corin Tucker. Corin may have been the vocal powerhouse of Sleater-Kinney but she sang to a distant point beyond the audience while Carrie looked into the crowd and danced as she played. She welcomed you.

If you lived in the Pacific Northwest you might have spotted her buying coffee on Broadway in Seattle, or you might have seen her lined up for a show at the Midnight Sun in Olympia. You might have heard that she sat next to the friend-of-a-friend in a college writing class. You might have lost track of whether Carrie was really a celebrity or some kind of distant acquaintance.

Though it’s been about a month—wait, I mean a decade—since I last walked downtown to watch a Sleater-Kinney show, Carrie has been reincarnated into my adult life as one half of the TV series Portlandia. A few weeks ago I took up the project of catching up with it in the late evening hours after my children had fallen asleep. (Because of the way that time moves now, I had missed four full seasons.)

For me, Portlandia is part sketch comedy, part internal reckoning. As I watch the show, my ghost-self is always hovering, mulling over Carrie Brownstein and the Sleater-Kinney legacy. Why is she an actress now? When your band has been widely acclaimed as one of the most seminal voices of your generation, what makes you want to set down your guitar and do skits on TV instead? I ask myself this question over and over because it is unanswerable; I am not Carrie Brownstein and so I will never know. Also: I ask myself this question because I am struggling to understand the choices we make in our twenties and thirties. I wonder if there’s a linear process to becoming who we are, a point of destination at the end of a long path, or if there is no true self, just a series of options, some of them more interesting than others. Carrie helps me remain confused by all of this.

Last Thursday, on the rainy evening that followed my sighting of the Reelect Obama sticker, I met a friend downtown for drinks at a bar I hadn’t visited for years. We settled into a private booth and hanging directly above her head was a Sleater-Kinney poster. I must have blinked and shook my head to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. My past was following me everywhere.

For that hour at the bar my friend and I remembered our lives in the late nineties. As we talked, my ghost-self wandered my old neighborhoods: I stood in the crowd as Sleater-Kinney opened a set with Little Babies at RKCNDY. I sat on the floor as Miranda July led interactive performance art at The Midnight Sun. I made spaghetti in the kitchen of my studio apartment with the music turned way up.

I looked again at the poster over my friend’s head, signed by Corin Tucker, and realized that it was memorabilia, an artifact from a bygone era, not so unlike the vintage Beatles lunch boxes and figures that my older siblings collected.

I’ve always thought that the pain of nostalgia is simply the sting of longing to visit a time you can never get back. But that night I started to wonder if it was more than that. For me nostalgia is tinged with regret at having been there without fully having been there. I went to a few shows, but not all of the shows; I bought some of the albums, but not all of the albums. Sometimes it takes the space of years to appreciate how good something truly was.

As I drove home I thought about how just as I pine for my early twenties, I also pine for a future life several years from now where my children don’t bombard me with multiple requests every waking moment, one where work-life balance comes with a little less effort. Most days I’m just trying to make it to bedtime.

And then I pined for Now. I wondered what it would mean to immerse myself more deeply in the present moment so that twenty years from now I won’t feel the same sting. Because that sweet spot that I’m waiting for—the one where both of my kids are young and sweet but not so relentlessly demanding—that will not a be a permanent life. Before I know it, my children will be gone and I will meet myself once again in a home so empty and quiet it begs to be filled with loud music.

There’s a Sleater-Kinney song, one of the first I ever heard, that’s kind of an anti-conformity rock anthem. Here are some of the lyrics:

They want to socialize you
They want to purify you
They want to dignify
Analyze and terrorize you

Your life is good for one thing
You’re messing with what’s sacred
They want to simplify your needs and likes
To sterilize you

(from Call the Doctor, 1996)

When I was young I was suspicious of this track; I could never tell to what extent it was satire of that heavy metal fuck-the-man trope, to what extent it was in earnest.

Now that I’m thirty-eight, I no longer care—in fact, I prefer earnestness. At thirty-eight, I realize that I need that song more now than I did at nineteen, that I need rock and roll while I’m driving my two kids around in a minivan, juggling family and work and asking myself what really matters, when I’m noticing how quickly my own life is passing, when I’m coming to terms with the fact that some day it will all be over, and if time keeps speeding up the way it does the end will be here faster than I think, and I’ll have wondered what I did with it all, and why I made the choices I did. That’s the moment I most need Corin Tucker’s voice reminding me of what I knew as a young adult: that the forces of the world conspire to make you numb and normal, that owning your life requires a battle.

Featured image by Jon Rubin, https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonrubin/687640891

RKCNDY flyer from http://www.electrip.com/sleater-kinney/1html/showsH/1998shows.html

When Rainbows Light the White House

June 27, 2015 | Jennifer Berney

Yesterday morning, when the Supreme Court announced their ruling on same-sex marriage, I was driving to the airport with my wife. Kellie has been my wife for twelve years if you’re going by our personal vows, but only two years if you’re going by the state’s laws. If I had thought to turn on NPR, I probably would have heard the news, but instead I just stared out the window and commented on the lack of traffic.

Perhaps if I had listened closely at the airport I would have caught wind of this big story, but I was just focused on how hot I was and cranky, waiting in the 40-minute TSA line.

And once Kellie and I arrived in California, I didn’t plug in. We sat on the beach and stared at the water, enjoying the quiet. In those moments, I appreciated my distance from the world.

And so I was surprised when, at 9 pm, after settling into a cabin at the end of a winding road, I finally plugged in and discovered that nearly all of the profile pictures in my Facebook feed were covered in rainbows. “Something big happened,” I announced to Kellie who sat in the next room, reading. I had known the Supreme Court decision was imminent, but hadn’t dared hope for the best-case scenario.

“What?” she asked.

I opened a link to a story that explained the significance of the supreme court decision: all fifty states must now recognize same-sex marriages.

“What?” Kellie asked me again, and I opened my mouth to answer her, and tried for a while, but nothing came out. I could not speak because I was sobbing.

Kellie rose from the couch to come find me. I worried it looked like I had just encountered horrible news, that I had just learned of a friend’s sudden death, but still I couldn’t speak. “Oh my god,” I finally whispered. “It’s over.”

I thought that Kellie and I were done getting married, that not much could touch me ever since the repeal of DOMA, but my life and my heart felt bigger knowing that the whole country had turned green.

Kellie stood behind me, reading the news on my screen, and when we finished we clicked through the slide show. Our mirth could not be contained—we cackled and sighed until we came to the last photo: the White House lit in rainbow. “Fucking Obama!” I cried out, and I know it sounds like I was cursing him, but really it was the opposite. What gall, what spunk, to turn a Supreme Court decision into a full-on presidential party. Fucking Obama. Because it is one thing to soberly announce that the country will now acknowledge our right to marry, and it is another thing entirely to thumb your nose at the haters and blast the White House with color.

Money Craves my Attention

May 19, 2015 | Jennifer Berney

My relationship with money has been troubled for a while. The problem isn’t money, it’s me. I’ve been neglectful. Sure, I appreciate what money does for me. It keeps my car running, it feeds me, it even buys me coffee every Friday. But my appreciation is hypothetical, unexpressed. Instead of tending to my relationship with money, I mostly just try to avoid it. I just keep spending what I spend, charging groceries on my debit card, buying new tires on credit, and then hoping that when I finally get around to checking my balances, I don’t discover that my account balance is zero, or that I’ve surpassed my credit limit.

But lately, some things have been reminding me that money would appreciate my attention. First, a friend of mine left this on my doorstep.

It’s a owl piggybank, an owl-pig. My friend has been buying piggy banks at Goodwill and then painting them, transforming them into talismans for prosperity. The owl-pig came with instructions. We must feed her coins and notes. We must talk to her about our dreams.

A few days after pig-owl arrived, I read a chapter from Michelle Tea’s How to Grow Up that describes the author’s efforts to change her relationship to money. The simplest take-away from this chapter is the Money Magnet chant:

I am a Money Magnet

Money comes to me

Money loves me

Money is sexually attracted to me

Money wants to be near me

I love money

I am money

According to Michelle Tea, the idea isn’t necessarily to seek magic or divine intervention (though we welcome those things too!), but to remind ourselves that we don’t need to live in an antagonistic relationship with money. Tea describes how she spent much of her youth avoiding money, and how this avoidance meant that she often found herself working for free while someone else was turning a profit. She writes, “I knew that in order to heal my abusive relationship with prosperity, I was going to have to start approaching this part of my life not with anger or hurt, but with love.” The chant simply helps remind the chanter that money is our friend. It wants to serve us.

With this in mind, I started to feed our owl-pig, and talk to our owl-pig, and also I said the Money Magnet chant a few times. Each time I said it I allowed myself to dream big, and over the course of ten days the following things happened.

I placed one essay in the New York Times Motherlode and another in The Washington Post. Breaking into one of these markets was my big personal goal for the year. Now…DONE! (I think I might take a nap.)

Kellie got an unexpected bonus at work.

I got a letter in the mail saying that I’d already been billed four times for a co-pay of $10.36, and if I didn’t settle up within the week, the bill was going to a collection agency.

Of course I was ecstatic about items 1 and 2, but number 3 was in its own way a gift, a wake-up call, a reminder of exactly how careless I’ve been. Bills arrive in the mail and they migrate to the edge of our kitchen table where they gather crumbs and stains. I put off dealing with them for weeks, and when I finally open the envelope, I think: Huh, this medical co-pay invoice for $3.27 is dated April 3. I swear I already paid this. I think they might have sent the bill on the same day that I put payment in the mail. Then I put it aside and intend to call the office on a Monday, but then I never do because who cares? It’s $3.27.

Every time this happens, I think about my mother and how throughout my childhood she sat at the dining room table and paid bills every Saturday morning. (She probably still does.) She balanced her checkbook as she went. Paying attention to money was a part of her weekly routine. Every month or so I ask myself why can’t I do that? By the time I get around to paying the bills it takes hours and it looks like this:

But afterwards, when the waste has been recycled, and the bills have been paid, and I see that there’s still some money left in checking, or I at least understand that we need a couple of months to pay the credit card back down, my world feels a whole lot cleaner. It’s not so much about having a lot, it’s about knowing what I have. I can breathe. I can make informed choices.

And so, I’m trying my best to remember that money is my friend, that the more I attend to money, the more money will attend to me.

NPR, Gay Marriage, & The Years of Crying in My Car

April 13, 2015 | Jennifer Berney

These days, when I listen to NPR on my commute to and from work, I’m not usually crying. In fact, I’m barely listening. Some days I’m trying to listen but I’ve got a kid or two hounding me for snacks, or trying to get me to listen to an endless monologue on Minecraft. Other days when I’m particularly preoccupied, I catch myself not listening at all. I realize I’ve had no idea what anyone has been saying for at least five minutes, and I push the button on my console and note the relief that silence brings.

Image from: http://www.baseball-almanac.com — Source: http://www.baseball-almanac.com

But on my Friday morning commute last week, this interview with Billy Bean cut through all of the static in my brain. Billy Bean was a Major League Baseball player in the nineties who came out as gay four years after retiring. In the interview, he tells the story of losing his partner to AIDS, and then opening the baseball season the next day. Because he was closeted, no one on his team knew anything about his loss.

Bean has recently been hired as Major League Baseball’s LGBT ambassador. Can we pause for a moment and let that sink in, because still, four days later, I’m still experiencing cognitive dissonance. Major League Baseball has hired an LGBT ambassador. What world am I living in?

I choked up at several moments in the interview, and was reminded that during the years when the push for same-sex marriage was gathering momentum, I was often listening to NPR and crying in my car. The tears seemed to bubble spontaneously from a mysterious underground source. One moment I’d be vaguely happy while listening to a report about the Marriage Equality Act in New York State, and the next moment there’d be an interview with some lesbian couple in their seventies and I’d be pulling into the parking lot, having to take a few minutes to sit there and wipe the snot from my nose. I’m not sure it would be accurate to say I was crying for joy, though I certainly wasn’t crying out of sadness.

I remember leaving work one afternoon and starting my car while Melissa Block was mid-interview with Dan Savage discussing the It Gets Better Project. I listened along, happy and dry-eyed until the interview was over and Melissa Block read his bio. “Columnist Dan Savage along with his husband Terry Miller created the It Gets Better Project.” It was the word husband than got me. I cried so hard I shuddered. Dan Savage lives about 65 miles away from me and at the time of the interview gay marriage was still illegal in our state. So it startled me to hear a major news outlet refer to Terry Miller as his “husband” as if it were a normal, legitimate, everyday thing.

Sometimes, I guess, we don’t know how much something aches until we attend to it. When I was a child I noticed that when I had an accident—if I fell hard on my butt, or bonked my head—I wouldn’t cry at first. “Are you okay?” another kid might ask me. I’d nod that I was fine as the tears gathered in my eyes. It was like the pain didn’t happen until it was noticed.

In the nineties and early aughts as I was coming of age, gay marriage struck me as a hypothetical goal at the end of a long road. Having my partnerships go unrecognized was an inequality that I expected to live with for the rest of my life. But apparently I had more feelings about it than I ever knew. Each instance of crying in my car—and there were dozens—was a letting go of an ache I never realized I carried.

At the end of his NPR interview, Billy Bean talks about walking through the Major League Clubhouse for the first time as his “whole self,” a self where he can be known as Major League player and a gay man. The phrase whole self makes me think about how we fragment our identities, and how at first, perhaps, that fragmentation creates a sense of numbness more than pain. When we are finally whole or at least engaged in the act of healing, of fusing the selves we’ve separated, that’s when all the pain comes rushing to the wound. Sometimes the healing hurts more than the rupture.

Selfish Moms Unite

September 13, 2014 | Jennifer Berney

As a parent, and especially a mother,* I resist the notion that time taken for myself is “selfish”. The way I see it, our family is a symbiotic unit, and as the primary caretaker, the demands on me are endless. On a typical day I am held close, pushed away, kissed, zerberted, punched, jumped on from behind, and literally sucked on. I pour juice and make toast, and then clean it up once it has fallen on the floor. I pack lunches, and then unpack the chewed-on scraps at the end of the day. I change diapers, wipe butts, wash tiny pairs of briefs, and instruct on proper aiming technique. All of this may or may not be extra challenging for me because I am an introvert—it might just be plain hard for everyone. And so, as a general rule, I resolve to fill my own cup at any opportunity. I don’t believe that time away from my kids is time stolen from my kids. The more time I have for myself, I reason, the kinder I will be to my children, more able to tolerate the zerberts and the poop.

But sometimes I feel like I’m in the minority. I hear about the parents who haven’t gone out for a drink in six years, or the moms who would never dream of dropping their child off at daycare on a day they didn’t have to work. And though in principal I refuse to feel guilty for taking me-time, when I drop Stump off at daycare just to experience the sensation of having two free arms for a few hours, I often imagine their disapproving glares.

This week was my last week of summer break, a week where Smoke had kindergarten every day, and, because it is September, Stump is enrolled in full-time daycare. In other words, the stars aligned and granted me twenty-five child-free hours.

To justify this time to the imaginary judgers, I made big plans. I would write a book and organize the house. I would run every day and stockpile healthful meals for my family. The week came and went and I made the smallest bit of headway on these goals. I wrote the rough draft of one chapter. I got rid of clothes that no longer fit Stump. I roasted a chicken. But I also filled my own cup in ways that might be just as important. I share them with you now in case any of you, dear readers, need an antidote to the imaginary judging eyes.

1. I spent time getting places. Since my week was still full of drop-offs and pick-ups and since the weather was crisp and dry, I took lots of little walks and rode my bike around town. I noticed the weather. I breathed.

2. I saw this badass raccoon. Because I left the car behind as much as possible, I slowed down enough to glimpse this tail-less old raccoon, who was roaming my neighbor’s yard in broad daylight. As you can see, he was unimpressed with me. After I took this picture, he started chewing the fleas off of his butt.

3. I rekindled my love for Dan Savage. Instead of re-organizing the house top-to-bottom, I just tried to stay on top of the daily maintenance with a little more precision. The dishes and the laundry were enough to keep me busy. Because there was no five-yearold around to ask me what that guy was talking about when he said BDSM, I listened to about a dozen episodes of the Savage Lovecast while doing chores. I’ve loved Dan Savage since the nineties, when I was eighteen and stumbled across his sex-positive advice column. I was so comforted to find this voice that was a) openly gay, b) smart and enggaed, and c) hilarious. It’s nearly twenty years later and I still love Dan Savage. In particular, I love Savage Lovecast Episode 411, where Dan responds to the recent celebrity nude photo hacks and offers some tough love to a woman with a transgendered friend. Sometimes Dan Savage is so right on, he brings me to tears.

4. I ate a salted caramel cupcake in the sun. The last two days of my week were beautiful from morning to evening, and on Thursday, I road my bike downtown to drink coffee and write. I almost talked myself out of buying a cupcake at the shop next door before riding home. You know, I didn’t really need that. I bought it anyways and sat on the bench. I didn’t have to share. Inside the cake itself, there was a surprise extra glob of caramel.

*Normally, I try to write about “parenting” rather than “mothering”, because I don’t want to gender-ize the parenting experience. However, in this case, I’ve noticed that our culture has trained mothers more than fathers to feel guilty for prioritizing their own needs.

Among Life’s Disappointments: The Two-Day Weekend

September 9, 2014 | Jennifer Berney

On Sunday I had to break the news to Smoke that Monday would be a school day. I wasn’t sure how he’d take it. So far, he hasn’t been forthcoming about his kindergarten experience. At the end of every day I’ve asked him “What was the best part of your day?” and every day he’s answered, “Recess.”

“You feel that way already?” Kellie asked him on day one. I guess we both hoped he’d say he loved learning songs in circle time, or mastering sight words during reading. But both of Smoke’s best friends go to his school, both have been assigned to different classrooms, and so recess is a twenty-minute parent-free play date. Of course that’s his favorite.

So, anyhow, I wasn’t sure if he’d be excited or disappointed to learn that Monday was imminent, and that Monday meant the beginning of the school week. We were lying sideways on the bed, and I gave it to him straight: “Tomorrow is a kindergarten day.”

“What?” he answered. His lower lip quivered. “But that’s not fair—I haven’t had enough home days!”

I understood where he was coming from. During the school year, I never feel like I’ve had enough home days. For the last two months, I’ve had the luxury of summer, where home days and work days blend together. I’ve taught one online class and paid for childcare here and there; most days I’ve graded papers through nap time or answered emails on the fly. I’ve been relieved from the Pressure To Perform during the workweek, followed by the Pressure to Do All the Shopping and Connect with All the People and Do All the Laundry and also RELAX and HAVE FUN on the weekend. Instead, I just worry about attending to one thing or another, keeping the kids happy enough, and hopefully enjoying some part of the day. I’m a little productive and a little bit restful, and the rest is just survival. That’s how it should be.

I think that’s also how it’s been for Smoke up until now. For the last several years, he’s gone to preschool two days a week, played at a friend’s house the other two, and had three days at home. So, kindergarten is actually his initiation into the American-Capitalist workweek.

And while before this week I’d been imagining that kindergarten is all fun and games, all circle time and finger painting, Smoke’s tears over home days have helped me to remember what school felt like for me as a child. School felt: Relentless. Every day I spent seven hours at the mercy of my teachers. We lined up outside the school and waited in the weather for first bell. We’d be shuffled then to homeroom, then to art or music, then to recess, then to reading groups. We moved always in single file, and every segment of the day was marked by the shrill sound of the school bell that rang through every classroom.

My teachers were kind. I admired them; I wanted to please them. But having so little agency exhausted me, and so I welcomed any break—holidays and sick days, weekends and vacations. I didn’t call them “home days,” as Smoke does, but that’s what I longed for. Days to sit in the square of sun that came through the window, days to keep my pajamas on till noon, days to meander on my bike, or play Barbies, or put my new reading skills to use. Days where home was at the center of my day, not just the place where it started and ended.

Monday came, as it always does, and Smoke woke up without my help. He dressed himself and packed his own lunch without complaining about the day ahead. But when we arrived at school it took minutes for him to settle into the kindergarten lineup, and once he had he stared off into space. He was slack jawed and just a little pale, his eyes unfocused. He looked unmistakably weary.

Weekday (one of Smoke's many selfies) — Weekday (one of Smoke’s many selfies)

Smoke is right. Two days just don’t yield enough time to recoup what the workweek has taken.