Reclaiming Wife

Apr 2013

I want you. I need you. Oh baby, oh baby.

We’ve always had rules in our household about technology use. Bedrooms are technology free zones. No checking email from bed, no watching TV when you go to sleep. The table is the same way. Meals are unfettered by technology, please and thank you. But the truth is, we have a problem. More specifically, I have a problem.

The problem is that the lure of connectedness is following me wherever I go, and not allowing technology at the dinner table isn’t helping the situation. Not anymore.

The problem, of course, is dopamine. A recent Life Hacker article on why technology is so addictive explains, ”We can develop a dopamine release from many kinds of addictive behavior. Checking email is one in particular. You may not like spending long amounts of time in your inbox, but you probably think about checking it pretty often. When you hear that ding (or vibrate), you know there’s something waiting for you.” An article from The New York Times series Your Brain on Computers explained it this way: “The lower-brain functions alert humans to danger, like a nearby lion, overriding goals like building a hut. In the modern world, the chime of incoming email can override the goal of writing a business plan or playing catch with the children.” In short, I’m increasingly feeling like I’m missing parts of my day-to-day life because I can’t hear it over the hum of technology addiction.

I’ve had something of a slow slide into technology use. I grew up without a single screen in my house, which is a fancy way of saying we didn’t have a TV (personal computers were years away). We weren’t a Waldorf family, we were just something of a lazy, slightly hippy family. My parents didn’t want to have to bother monitoring our TV intake, so they didn’t get a TV. We got a (actually kind of usable) personal computer somewhere around 1994, along with dial up internet. In 1996, I moved beyond AOL chat rooms, to the beginnings of my more modern relationship with internet, in the form of Ani DiFranco fan sites. (The internet has always functioned a bit as portable counterculture for me). My graduation gift in 1998 was my own (huge) computer to take to college, which I mostly used to write my papers, and check email once or twice a day. And then, in about 2003, I got a laptop. That, of course, was the beginning of the end. With a laptop, I checked my email…whenever I was home. I resisted iPhones for quite awhile (much to David’s dismay). I’d tell him, “The last thing I need is more internet. Internet on the bus? No thank you.” But in 2010, I gave in. Since then, things have moved pretty quickly downhill.

My parents, of course, were right. The problem with technology is that when you have it, you have to limit it. And limiting it is really really hard.

Last month I was in the car, listening to an NPR story about the national day of unplugging, digital shabbat, and the slow tech movement. I kept thinking that I really needed a space for a tech Shabbat in my life, but was unsure if we could pull off unplugging for a day. That, frankly, was embarrassing.

But that isn’t what made me snap. A few weeks later, I was downstairs in our garden on a mid-day break, and had that feeling of seeing double that too much screen time brings. I looked around and had the crushing realization that I had what I wanted, and I was missing it. I had the superficial wish listy things that I’d wanted since I was a little girl: wood floors, vegetable garden, and one recently acquired hammock. But beyond those physical things, I had an awesome partner, a job I loved, a great community of friends, and one hilarious and amazing tiny baby. It had been a long road, and life was still glorious in its imperfections, but I had so much goodness around me.

And I was still pinning things to my Pinterest boards.

Pining and Pinning

I have a great Pinterest board for our garden. It has hammocks and Adirondack chairs and bougainvillea on it. I also now have hammocks and Adirondack chairs and bougainvillea in our garden. But instead of being out there every single sunny moment that we could, far too often I was inside, pinning new ideas. When I was playing with the baby, I was also instagramming with my phone. (He’s really cute, you guys. Such things must be documented.) I was missing out, and I was increasingly aware of it.

The problem, of course, is that so much of our lives are now tied to the computer. There is the mundane stuff: looking up where a restaurant is, emailing for an appointment, shopping for…hammocks. But there is the good stuff too. As I sit and write this, I’m looking at a screen, doing a job I love. My life is filled with real-life friends I’ve made through the internet. The blog-o-sphere has enriched my life for a decade, and I’m so honored to get to give back to it. Tamera of Verhext has called the internet “The fog layer on the real world,” and that’s it. The internet can be an amazing place, but it’s not, in fact, the real 3D physical world. Continue reading Don’t Pin It—Do It

Posted in: Life, Marriage, Meg's Thoughts, Reclaiming Wife | 185 Comments »

Apr 2013

Marriage And Early Motherhood Part II

Last week we gave you part one of Marriage and Early Motherhood, a two-part interview series where I get to pepper Meg with questions about her thoughts on choosing to have kids, being pregnant, and her perspective on the past few months of being a new mom. While the idea for this feature might have been ours (well, mine. I possibly harassed Meg into talking more about motherhood in one post than she probably plans to for the rest of time), the content is decidedly yours. The questions we’re asking were sourced from the almost five hundred comments you left in our open thread on the same subject back in March. And man are they good ones. If I’m being honest, part two is my favorite half of the interview, because today we get at some of the more taboo topics in motherhood—the stuff we aren’t talking about in a lot of other places: bodies, support systems, and the pressure for motherhood to be an all-consuming force. So if you missed part one, go check it out and come back. If you’re here for round two, let’s dig in.

—Maddie

Cage Match: My Thighs vs. Awesome Baby

Maddie: Ok, I just want to throw a few words out there and have you respond to them. I want to hear you talk about vanity. Because I feel like there is a lot that goes into, just, body stuff.

Meg: I think people are kind of ashamed to say that they have issues around vanity. And I mean, I think humans do. I don’t even think that’s something just women do. I gained more than forty percent of my body weight during pregnancy, and I was not made to feel awesome about that by the medical establishment. I did not do anything funny; that’s just what my body wanted to put on. I then turned around and it is almost all gone, I have a four-month-old, and I have not spent an inordinate amount of time at the gym. In fact, I could not go to the gym until week twelve because of medical stuff. So, my point there is not that you should be required to lose all of your pregnancy weight. If you can’t breastfeed, for example, it’s just going to take a long time. My point is the human body is way more resilient than we’re led to believe.

That said, there are parts of your body that will never be the same. There are things that’ll never be the same, but I hear people talking about it like that’s a reason to stop themselves from having kids if they otherwise want to. My problem with that is not the vanity, because you’re allowed the vanity. My problem with that is that shit’s going to happen anyway because you’re going to get older. So if you want to have kids, the idea that you would, like, worry that your boobs aren’t gonna look as awesome? Newsflash, your boobs are not going to look as awesome. That train has already left the station. So, there are parts of your body that will never look the same, though for me it hasn’t been terrifically extreme. I don’t want to say this in a minimizing your fears kind of way, but it literally is like, I look at my thighs and think, “I have a lot of stretch marks,” and then I look at my baby and think, “There is a new human being who lives here who is awesome.” I’m not saying I don’t have huge amounts of vanity like everybody else, but you can’t even compare. I’m like, “My thighs vs. awesome baby? Whatever, I’m going to buy a different swimsuit this year. Moving on.”

Everything Will Change…Right?

Maddie: Okay, so the other word. Motherhood and identity and all that goes with it. Motherhood and identity. I feel like you have a lot to say about motherhood, so I’m not even going to ask you a question.

Meg: Not everyone shares my opinion on this, but I do not feel like I have a new identity. At all. Period. The interesting thing about this is there are a lot of very smart women in my life who I’m very close to and respect a ton who have really felt like motherhood sort of internally rebuilt them. And I do not feel like that. I feel like I am exactly the person I was before I had the baby. I just now have a baby and in a lot of ways—and I don’t mean this in an everyone should have a baby sort of way at all—but the change for me is that I feel like I have a richer and deeper interior life than I did. I would say that I’m happier than I was, but you know, my interests are not any different. And my identity is not any different. And if I can say that now, when I am still deeply in the thrall of hormones, then that is a pretty radical thing to say. Because I think often your identity really shifts when you’re in the thrall of the hormones, and then by the time you’re the parent of a twelve-year-old, you’re not—I have friends who are parents of twelve-year-olds because, again, people we know got pregnant right after high school—by the time you kid is thirteen, you’re not like, “My identity revolves around my teenager.” But I didn’t even really experience that in the short term. Your mileage may vary, however.

Maddie: What about the flipside? Maybe it’s because, I dunno, I’m a couple years behind, or because of where I lived, or whatever, but on the flip side, I feel this extreme pressure to, if we do have a kid one day, to make it sort of no big deal. I did the same thing with my marriage where I was like, “Just married, no big deal. I think I like this guy, he’s okay,” kind of thing. And I’m afraid that I will be…

Meg: Why is that?

Maddie: I think it’s a rejection of the cultural narrative that it’s this huge, life altering…

Meg: …everything will change.

Maddie: Yes, exactly. So I feel like I need to say, “Nope, all the same here. Fine and dandy.” And I don’t know if that’s something that will change, or if I’m shooting myself in the foot with that.

Meg: I think you have to allow for the fact that things change. My identity has not shifted, but that doesn’t mean that all kinds of things haven’t changed. You know, there’s a whole new person in our lives. So, I think it’s a little bit of a balance. I also think that I’m in a weird situation in terms of identity, because super weirdly to me—because friends of ours had kids twelve and thirteen years ago—but super weirdly to me we are young within our friends circle to have kids, young within the greater Bay Area professional scene to have kids. In David’s office, the people who have kids the same age as ours are partners in their early forties. So, I’ve been in this weird situation where I roll up to daycare and I’m wearing some—David always mocks me that I’m wearing some trendy crap. I’m wearing like, Hunter wellies and patterned tights and a jean skirt and a striped shirt. And everyone else is noticeably older and wearing office clothes. There really can be this sort of mismatch, I feel like I look like the babysitter. Which is ridiculous because I’m thirty-two. So it can be sort of interesting the ways your identity maybe doesn’t shift, and then how you relate to other parents. I haven’t figured that part out yet. At all.

How We Stay Sane

Maddie: One thing I want to talk about is this idea of support. Because I feel like there is this myth of you and your partner, and that’s it, and you just do this. And I’ve noticed just by spending time with you—you have a pretty big support system.

Meg: Maddie knows that because she had my baby at her farm all day on Saturday. And she couldn’t do it alone at her farm.

Maddie: I couldn’t!

Meg: She had a husband and a roommate and a box of Chicken in a Bisket. And a dog.

Maddie: So true.

Meg: I think support is the most key thing to talk about. Continue reading Marriage And Early Motherhood Part II

Posted in: Entrepreneurship, Gender & Feminism, Life, Marriage, Meg's Thoughts, Reclaiming Wife | 190 Comments »

Apr 2013

A Chronology, In Furniture

Today’s anonymous post is not romantic in the traditional sense. And yet, I found myself ugly crying by the time I got to the end of it (ugly crying, by the way, is apparently the only way I know how to cry these days. Thanks APW.) Because at its core, this post speaks the most to the kind of romance that exists within my relationship. It’s not about grand romantic gestures, or Sunday mornings spent lounging in bed, or carefully planned gifts to each other. It’s about waking up in the morning and making a choice to build a life that includes each other, a life that is the product of of me plus my partner. Because while my relationship might not include many bouquets of flowers or surprise dinners, it does include a lot of concessions for my dreams, a lot of compromises for my wants, and a lot of Craigslist furniture carried down three flights of stairs even though Michael’s not totally sure he wants it. Sure, those things aren’t grand. But in my book, they are huge.

—Maddie

It starts in 2006. We are dropping the college beer weight. We have paychecks that (mostly) cover our Saturday nights. We share a dog between four of us that we take turns smuggling in and out of the apartment in a large bag, averting our eyes at the “NO DOGS ALLOWED” signs posted along the bathroom route. We are one month, two months, four months, seven months into this new pronoun, us. We go to Bed, Bath and Beyond to buy you a mattress pad for the nights I sleep over. I sleep over a lot.

It is 2007, late summer, early fall, one of those periods when all the U-Haul trucks are rented out and we are scraping together our security deposits. Our not-yet-closest friends are moving in together after years of dating. They have a roommate, another close friend, their third wheel. Smart, we say. They’re just saving money, we tell each other. Then the wine hutch appears.

It is brown and sturdy. There is no accompanying booklet with a crudely drawn Swedish man assembling furniture step by step. It has slots to hang wine glasses upside down. It is a gift from one of their parents, an “investment piece.” It sits in their shared living room, but we know it is meant for a future room. It says: we will lose all the beer weight, we will buy pots and wine glasses with stems, we will pay down debt and accumulate more, we will get older. We will choose one person.

We ignore the wine hutch.

It is 2008. To celebrate the end of your first year in law school, we go camping, and you break your foot diving for the Frisbee. We ignore the swelling and go crabbing. We go to our first wedding and laugh when your aunt asks about my left hand ring finger. You move apartments and plastic tubs of your mom’s old dishes.

It is 2009, and our now-closest friends get married, and their wine hutch leaves the East Coast with them. I move away for school; you help me stuff trash bags with my clothes. We go to the Nutcracker at Christmastime, but we cannot afford two seats together. You fall asleep against the wall. We spend the weekend drinking champagne, just because.

It is 2010. You graduate and consider leaving—leaving the U.S., leaving for training, leaving me. I spend the summer wandering the streets of a new city by myself, hanging sheets as substitute curtains in my rented room. One morning, we sit reading the paper at brunch, petting someone else’s dog, thinking out loud, “What if?” You decide to stay; I push you away anyway. Continue reading A Chronology, In Furniture

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife | 35 Comments »

Apr 2013

Marriage And Early Motherhood, Part I

When I first approached Meg to do an interview with me about early motherhood, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to get out of it exactly. It’s not so much that Michael and I are even in a place where we want kids yet, but I’m definitely in a place where I want to be able to talk about wanting kids without having to spiral down into hyperbole. So much of what’s available for conversations about parenting is either fear-mongering, or condescending, or prescriptive, and none of it allows for me to safely express my anxieties about having children in a space where I feel like I’m being given platform for honest discussion (both online and off). And if the 500 plus comments from our open thread on the subject are any indication, I’m willing to bet that the same goes for a lot of you.

Over the past few years APW has played the role for me of best friend’s big sister, who will tell it like it is. So, I thought maybe an old fashioned sleepover-type confessional could be the answer. As some of you might know from Meg’s pregnancy announcement last year, Meg and David are choosing to keep their family life pretty private, so this might be the most I ever get out of her on the subject. Meg will be the first to tell you that she’s no expert on child-rearing (her words were “I’ve been at this for exactly four and a half months. You can call me in for expert advice when I’ve had ten kids.”) Which means that this interview is not meant to be in any way prescriptive, nor is it meant to represent the experience of all new mothers everywhere. Rather, in the same way that I once found solace in these pages hearing that marriage wouldn’t fundamentally change who I am if I didn’t let it, and that a career move isn’t a prison sentence, this interview gave me the reassurance that having children doesn’t mean getting on a roller coaster ride and enduring it until it’s time to get off. When Meg and I first started talking about this interview, she told me, “I don’t want to offer any advice on motherhood, other than the magic that is overnight diapers. The rest is just thoughts from the trenches. Your mileage may vary.” I think that just about sums it up. So here is part one of Marriage And Early Motherhood (part two to follow next week). May it spark a non-terrifying conversation that makes you feel a little better too.

—Maddie

That Gut Feeling

Meg: Are you going to set the scene? Wisteria. A lime popsicle. The sun. Chicken enchiladas, cooked by Meg’s husband.

Maddie: [Laughing] Yes. The enchiladas were really good. Ok, so one of the first questions people asked in the comments of our open thread was about the issue of confidence with the decision to have kids. Because I think a lot of people are concerned that if you aren’t 100% certain that you want, want, WANT a baby, that you have no business having one. And I’m curious what your take is on that?

Meg: Yeah, I think that’s bullshit. There’s this Elizabeth Gilbert quote in Committed where someone says to her something like, “Having a baby is like having a tattoo on your face. If you’re not sure about it, you shouldn’t get it.” And I just don’t think that’s true. There are very few decisions in life that you’re that sure about, period. Right? And I think that probably anyone who is 100% sure about having kids and never has any questions about it, that is where I might question whether or not you knew what you were getting into. Because you’re committing to a very big life change, and the scary thing about having kids is that it’s the one of the few things in your life you can’t get out of. The dirty secret about marriage is that if it doesn’t work you get a divorce. Yeah, it sucks, and it’s going to fuck up your life but you move on. The scary part about having a kid is that it’s irrevocable. So if there isn’t some part of you that’s like, “Uh, is this a good idea?” I just worry that you haven’t applied your analytical self to it.

Maddie: I feel like there’s this thing that’s happening, where there’s celebrity pregnancies are really oddly sexualized, and then in educated, urban communities there is this glorification of pregnancy and motherhood. I’m curious how you anticipated, and also dealt with that. Because that’s something I’m scared of… having to explain why I’m either bottle feeding or not using cloth diapers, or on the flipside having to explain doing all those things… I guess, it’s the whole mainstream versus indie thing.

Meg: Right. In some ways we were protected because we’re so early in our friends circle having kids.

Maddie: Which is hilarious also.

Meg: Right? Because I’m, what? 32? But we have a couple of friends who have kids… our friends who have kids have kids who are either five or thirteen (we have a lot of friends that got pregnant right after high school, or are a little older than us, or who just don’t have kids at all.) There was no one that was contemporaneously having children. So we were able to do things the way we thought were logical, which has led to some interesting social moments later, when we were around parents, because we, like, didn’t know that everyone got an infant car seat and it just didn’t seem logical to us, so we didn’t get an infant car seat. We got a convertible car seat, and then we didn’t have an infant carrier to carry the baby around with and I totally looked like I was making a political statement when I was out with other mothers. But that sort of protected me in some ways. I did feel a lot of pressure around the, what I call the Cult of Whole Motherhood: give birth at home, don’t have an epidural, don’t ever bottle feed, etc. Though ultimately a lot of that stuff worked itself out. I sort of fundamentally (no surprise here, the whole site is built around this) am just not a dogmatic person. So I went into labor being like, you know it might be nice not to get an epidural, but we’ll see, I had a pretty precipitous labor so—our doula actually said it was the most intense labor she’d ever witnessed—so I got an epidural. I had milk supply issues right away, so I supplemented with formula. Because it seemed like the baby was going to starve if we didn’t. And now, he’s 95% breast fed. So I sort of worked it out by doing what was logical. But there does have to be a certain amount of just tuning out what different people want you to do.

Do Your Hormones Eat Your Rational Brain?

Maddie: Shifting to post-baby, one of the questions that really struck me in the comments of the open thread was whether or not you can avoid your own hormones? And this idea that there’s a lot of inevitability built into having a kid, in that you can say you’re not going to want to do X, or you can think you don’t want do Y, but once the baby’s there and your hormones kick in, it’s a whole new ballgame.

Meg: Sort of yes, sort of no. I think the way the narrative is built is really damaging. You’re not going to become a new person unless on some level you want to become a new person or are secretly hoping you’ll become a new person or are just really embracing that. So this whole idea that “You just don’t now, you just don’t know”—I think in the big picture I don’t know that that’s actually true. I knew I wanted to keep working, and people said “Oh you just don’t know, you just don’t know,” and, well, no. I know who I am, right, so I do want to keep working.

However, you don’t know what your hormones are going to do. But the idea that your hormones take over your rational brain is not true. I was not aware the I was physically going to go through withdrawal having the baby in daycare, I was going to be physically shaky at first because my hormones were at conflict with my rational mind. My rational mind wanted to be at work, but also my baby was happier in daycare, I was happier with him in daycare, but my hormones were telling me something else. So yes. In some ways you can’t avoid your hormones and they are super powerful, and they’re going to do what they are going to do, but your rational mind is still as much in play as ever.

Maddie: When it comes to a lot of the other stuff that I think people try to caution you about: the lack of sleep, how much attention they need, how many physical needs they have, I know a lot of people expressed concern over just being able to function as they know themselves in those early days and whether or not they could physically survive it. Continue reading Marriage And Early Motherhood, Part I

Posted in: Entrepreneurship, Gender & Feminism, Life, Marriage, Reclaiming Wife | 180 Comments »

Apr 2013

Reclaiming Wife: Notes From The Bathtub On Marriage And Independence

Some days, I worry about the balance. I worry about how to keep marriage a partnership, without lazily merging into one lump of shared likes and dislikes, hobbies and projects. Staying Meg and David, not Meganddavid or Davidandmeg sometimes takes a bit of conscious effort. And other times, say, when you’re trapped in a bathtub like Emily, it takes no effort at all. In those moments, you realize it was so obvious all along.

—Meg

I write this from the bathtub, where I am sitting, with my shoes on, listening to tornado sirens wail.

One of the things I was most worried about before C and I got married was losing my independence. I was worried that there was a “Single Emily” that I would never get to know, or that being half of a marriage would mean that I was no longer a whole person. Living in a city where rent made living alone prohibitively expensive may have played a role here. Most of all, I think I was afraid of not knowing how to be alone. In retrospect, you would think he had proposed that we become conjoined twins instead of getting married.

Well let me tell you (alone from the bathtub in the middle of a tornado), this first year of marriage has been a freaking crash course in “aloneness.” I’m pretty sure I get my advanced certification after tonight. Perhaps you think I’m being dramatic, and maybe I am. But I was deeply afraid that marrying young would leave me unprepared for moments like this. So here I am, alone, in the candle-lit bathtub on the phone with my mom. And I will be fine. Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: Notes From The Bathtub On Marriage And Independence

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Apr 2013

Reclaiming Wife: The Middle (Name)

For those of us that don’t take the name-change-after-marriage route (or the traditional last name for children route) life can be complicated. Since as a society we’re only starting to navigate new rules to go with new naming decisions, the results can be decidedly odd—like when I get mail addressed to Mrs. David Keene. Which, it’s very sweet that they tried, but they also got two out of three things wrong. Today’s post from Laura Holway is about only changing her middle name and the muddle that caused. It’s also so badass that I sent shouty emails to the staff about it the second I read it. The murky waters of name change. Let’s discuss. (P.S. You can see Laura’s crazy-amazing artist wedding right here.)

—Meg

On May 14, 2011, my husband Ben and I were married in the little theatre where we’ve collaborated on performance-making over the years. Out of the deal I got a hilarious and creative life partner, an extension of family that vaguely resembles the United Nations, and a brand new middle name.

The middle name part was a bit of a surprise given the conclusiveness of our We’re Not Changing Names discussion. Ben and I like our respective last names—together and apart. We’ve made a lot of art and lived a lot of life with our names stamped on it. But, one day a couple months before the wedding, it struck me that I could write in whatever I wanted on the “name after marriage” line of our marriage license. And, mutually motivated by a desire to mark my marriage transition while keeping my last name and to get rid of a middle name I wasn’t particularly fond of, I changed it. To Ben’s last name. I gut-checked a solid dozen times as I contemplated the change, but it just felt inexplicably right.

As with most decisions, though, there’s always some kind of result, not necessarily explained with a label as simple as “positive” or “negative.” I’m here to report that it’s lonely in the partial name-change camp: you changed something, but didn’t come out with the typical post-wedding result. Everyone’s confused. And, if you get really excited about your new middle name and change it on Facebook, you’ve officially lost everyone. Now it’s not just your Gramma sending you incorrectly addressed mail (Mr. & Mrs. Ben & Laura ?). Facebook assumes you suffered from dyslexia and swapped your maiden name for your married name, or that perhaps you forgot your own name altogether. And, Facebook would also like you to know that it’s partially your own fault for confusing people in the first place. You can make new rules, but sometimes you have to hand out educational fliers when you play by them.

It’s a strange mystery navigating the nuanced path of feelings that accompany a decision. I have a lot of feelings about my name, and I didn’t anticipate how strong they’d be. And, as with many very personal decisions, the world hasn’t intuited the depth of these feelings. As with every decision, regardless of how right it feels, it marks the death of what I didn’t choose. We will never be a single-name family, marked by a succinct return address stamp. And I don’t have the same name I grew up with.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my married friends and their names—a fabulous collection of brand-newly invented last names, hyphenated last names, husband’s last names, maiden names, and even partner last names that they don’t always use. I love them all. I love that these names represent decisions—the simultaneous embracing of one thing and saying “no” to something else. Maybe we’re united by the strength of the gut-check. Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: The Middle (Name)

Posted in: Gender & Feminism, Reclaiming Wife | 92 Comments »