Category: Pinned Posts

#mommyfail

On By BekkiIn Pinned Posts, This is Feminism2 Comments

We started Z on formula today.  Part of me is relieved about this. It means that pumping will no longer be a nightmare measured in ounces. It means that I can stop desperately trying to stockpile three days worth of milk in the freezer for when I have to travel. It means that if a late afternoon meeting runs over, I don’t have to choose between getting home in time to bathe her and put her to sleep or staying at work to pump so that I have enough milk to feed her the next day.

Mostly, I feel like a failure.

I couldn’t make enough milk for my daughter. I wasn’t willing to work hard enough. To pump longer, or more often. I cared more about my own convenience than about her health. I’m worried that writing this down will make people think less of me.

My friends who post stories on Facebook about how breastfeeding is the best thing you can do for your baby. My friends and family who’ve had kids and breastfed all the through.

I could justify it. I could tell you how long I struggled with this decision. I could tell you I asked my husband to buy the formula, because I couldn’t do it myself. I could tell you I pump five times a day, starting at six and ending at midnight, and I still can’t always get enough milk. I could tell you I’m trying not to cry while I type this. I could tell you that we’re just supplementing, not switching over to all formula.

But none of that matters, because I still feel like I’ve failed.

The women of my mother’s generation fought so that their daughters could have it all. A career. A family.

The women of my generation need to fight so that our daughters have it right. Parental leave for both parents that’s long enough to get back to human. A culture that views parenting as work which is just as hard and important as any other job – and compensates parents for the time they spend raising their children. An understanding that if one partner in a relationship wants it “all”, the other will need to make sacrifices in equal proportion. A culture free of judgement, free of the mommy wars, focused instead on what works for each family.

#haveitright

To Ben McCoy, Wherever I May Find Him

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An old friend of mine from summer camp died unexpectedly a few weeks ago.  I found out through Facebook, of course, where his sister had asked people to upload their old photos of him.  It wasn’t until I had all my old summer camp albums stacked on the dining room table that it hit me that he was gone, really gone.

I always thought I’d run into him again.

Sometimes, people come into your life and they change you, indelibly, unexpectedly.  I remember the music, the way it infiltrated those liquid summer nights, spiraling into the warm night air and settling around my shoulders like a hug.  I remember sunlight hitting bleached blond hair, and I remember summer girls in tank tops and denim shorts, and I remember a smile that went on forever, a smile that was yours, always and only.

I remember two questions.  Questions that book-ended the years I knew him.  Questions asked carelessly, in the middle of a crowded room.  Questions that still cut to the heart of who and what I am.  I never answered either.  I didn’t understand, until many years later, that I wasn’t meant to.

You could say I had a crush on him, but that wouldn’t quite be right.  I had a crush on the idea of him.  I was too shy, too awed by his popularity, too afraid of rejection to get to know him.  When I came across him on Facebook a few years ago I friended him, but I left it at that.  I didn’t think there was enough of a connection left for us to have any kind of conversation, for me to try to meet up with him when I passed through Boston.  I wish now that I had tried.

Because most of all, I remember a boy with mischief in his smile, and love enough in his soul that it was yours for the asking.

“Precious Things”

On By BekkiIn Pinned Posts, This is Feminism4 Comments

Yesterday, Amanda Palmer posted an amazing blog on internet hatred and bullying.  You should go read it.  Spend some time in the comments.  It will probably break your heart.  It broke mine.

When I was a kid, I was drawn to the kids who were different.  The ones who were fragile and fantastical and generally quite fucked up.  I didn’t hang out with the cool kids, partly because there was never money for whatever the latest craze in toys was – slap bracelets, troll dolls, sticker collecting – but mostly because the cool kids were boring.  My friends were never boring, but the flipside was that they would turn on me in an instant.  I had frenemies long before the term was popular.  Girls who loved me one day and said vicious things about me the next.  Or kicked me as we went down the stairs to recess, so that one year my shins were black and blue from September to June.  Or poured chocolate milk all over me during lunch.  Or took the confidences I had whispered during sleepovers and spread them among all the other girls to get a leg up the popularity ladder.

Seventh grade was the worst.  It was the year of the bar mitzvah’s.  I grew up in a mostly Jewish town, went to a mostly Jewish school.  There was a bar mitzvah almost every weekend, sometimes two.  The rich kids had their parties at the country club, where there would be a magician or face-painter or a DJ, or sometimes all three.  The popular girls collected photo albums of invitations.  Even the unpopular girls like me got invited to their share – someone who invited all of their homeroom, or all of their Hebrew school class, or whose parents made them invite the kids who’d been in carpool.

I don’t remember which one of them thought up the game.  I don’t even know why it was so funny to them, or so hurtful to me.  It went like this.  I would be sitting alone, staring at all the kids out on the dance floor and wishing someone would come over to talk to me.  A group of the popular boys would be hanging out at the other end of the table, whispering with each other.  Suddenly, one of them would run over to me, get down on one knee, and ask, “Will you marry me?”  I would sit there in shock and confusion, without a clue as to how to send him away so that I came off as the cool one.  Then, laughing hysterically, he would run back to his friends and they would all exchange high-fives.  I was convinced, utterly and absolutely, that what they were really telling me was that I was hideous, and ugly, and that nobody would ever, ever want to marry me.

By the time we hit high school, it was mostly over.  I hung out with the freaks, took the honors and AP classes, played lacrosse, dated a guy who thought I was gorgeous, and pretty much tried to ignore everyone who had caused me so much misery a few years back.  It worked so well that by the time senior year came around, I was a certain kind of cool.  At senior prom, one of the hottest guys in my class told my boyfriend he’d never realized how hot I was.  The popular boys wanted to pose for pictures with me on the last day of school.  I told them all to fuck off.

Which should be the end of it, except for one last thing.

About five years ago, one of the boys who’d played the marriage game found me on Facebook and sent a friend request.  I’ll admit, my response was not as graceful as it could have been.

facebook

I never wrote back, because I didn’t know what to say.  In truth, he wasn’t even the worst of them.  In high school, he was actually pretty friendly to me.  I still hated him, even more than I hated the ones who had bullied me for so long.  The way I saw it, they were idiots.  They couldn’t help themselves.  He was smarter, more popular, better than all of that.  He could have stopped them, if he’d wanted to.  He never did.

***

So.  To all those kids who made my life a living hell.  To the kids who lived through it from the other end.  To the ones who bullied, and were bullied, and watched the bullies and did nothing.  If you want to talk, I’m here.  I’m listening.  Hit me up in the comments.

And to all those kids who are going home after school and crying, and cutting, and wishing they could die:

IT.

GETS.

BETTER.

Wings & Glitter

On By BekkiIn Pinned Posts1 Comment

I go from day to day.  I know where the cupboards are.  I know where the car is parked.  I know he isn’t you.

Tori show last night, the first one I’ve seen since Florida.  I knew she’d be in New York, but wasn’t planning to go.  That part of my life feels long since over, the Florida show I went to with Liz six years ago one last grasp at adolescence.  The theatre released a block of tickets Monday morning, though, and I logged onto Ticketmaster for the hell of it and ended up with a seat five rows from the stage.

The show was epic.  Instead of the band she had a string quartet, and those boys played like they’d bought their instruments from the devil himself.  I sat next to a little fae boy, who had been to the same show at Great Woods in ’99 that I’d been at, and who confessed that he missed seeing all the teenage girls in their wings and their glitter.

We’ve grown up, I told him, put aside the wings in favor of careers and husbands.

I am finding myself, more and more, feeling as though perhaps I made a left turn when I should have gone write.  My husband told me he thought of my writing as a hobby.  I tried to explain it was more, that I need words the way most people need oxygen.  As so often happens when I speak, though, I got it wrong, and the upshot of the conversation was that the student loans get paid off and then we can think about leaving the city.

It frustrates me to be unable to explain why writing is unlike, say, gardening or model aircraft building, but he has something of a point.  I write in my free time, in the extra hour I have when I leave work before 9 pm or on the weekends when he is working.  I write on vacations, and in the odd spaces, but only when I have time for it.  It’s hard to justify switching to something as a career – especially something with no guarantee of earning you a living – when you don’t treat it as such.  And so, instead of spending my Sunday night relaxing on the couch watching TV, I edited.

Remniscent

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It’s been awhile.  In part that’s because I’ve been working crazy hours and spending most of the time I’m not at work trying to finish the novel.  (A post on that to follow, some time next week.  I promise).  In part, it’s because I’ve been making some much needed decisions on where to go with this.

Those of you who’ve been with me since the MySpace days remember what it used to be like, when I blogged about the crazy people I worked with and the boys I met and everything else that happens once you go down the rabbit hole into Florida.  MySpace got old.  I moved onto blogger and into Waitress in Paradise, where I wrote about the crazy people I worked with and the boys who broke my heart and everything else that California promised but didn’t deliver.

Then I went to law school.  Where I quickly figured out that personality was viewed as a negative and indiscretions, no matter how minor, could keep you from being admitted to the bar and therefore render that $150,000 you’d paid in tuition worthless.  So I took down Waitress and started a silly blog about law school that I didn’t bother to update very frequently because, let’s face it, not much happens in law school worth blogging about.

The idea behind MfB was that as the husband and I went out and explored New York and found strange and wonderful places, I would write about them.  A year in, I’m not finding much to write about.  There was the Night Market last year, and a few hours spent in the bowels of the Gramercy Hotel last week (forthcoming post on that, too), but not much between them.  The truth is, most of New York is disappointingly mediocre.  The food, the restaurants, the shows.  I’ve yet to find much magic here, and certainly nothing worth writing about.  Add to that the audience factor, that it’s hard to know if people are reading this or liking it without any kind of comments, and the incentive to put up posts melts away.

Except that one of my favorite people told me, in passing, that he was glad I was blogging again back in October when I put a few posts up.

So.  Expect to see more here in the future.  I’m still not sure what form it’s going to take, but this I do know.  I’m tired of hiding.  I’m tired of the person law school forced me to be.  It’s time I earned those wings.