Day 31

The final day. March is over at midnight, and I have completed another year. I have tried to remain focused on my mission, but it can be difficult when one is distracted by so many things, some good, some bad. So tonight, I let myself sort of ramble, thinking to myself on paper, and wrote an essay sort of about writing, sort of about…well, lots of things. Since I wrote about Cabbages and Kings earlier, maybe I should have written about shoes and ships and sealing wax, but none of those topics actually made it into my final essay.

So I want to say good bye for now, though you never know. I always think I’ll post during the year, but I never do, because I get busy. So until next year…keep up the fight.

ERUPTIONS FROM A WANDERING MIND

Another Women’s History Month has come and gone. Women around the world are still struggling to gain the same basic rights and human dignity afforded to men as a birthright. In some places, this struggle is much more serious, with the affronts to human rights more pronounced. But no country has at this point obtained anything close to parity in opportunity between men and women.

This year the United States inaugurated the first ever woman Vice President, a woman of color. She is talented, intelligent, energetic, and capable. She is inspiring. While some people were conspiring how to steal the victory and hand the office back to the old white man who was holding it, the rest of us were cheering her on, excited and hopeful, more hopeful than we’ve been in some time. It was a major milestone.

As women, we need to ensure that we do not get too complacent. We should take the Obama administration as a corrective if we get too giddy. Obama being in the White House did not end racism. It did not equalize the inequalities between the races. It did not prove a magic bullet. Many of us didn’t expect it would, but from listening to some conversations around me, it seems at least some people were sure having a black president would usher in a new post-racial society, where racism is just one of those archaic ideas, like phlogiston or trepanning. There are no magic bullets; voting for a person of color, or a woman, is not enough to change the world. It’s a good step…but only a step.

Meanwhile, I am excited as I get the new cover, and then the proof copies, of my hard copy version of last year’s version of Women’s Writes. Holding something like that in my hands is always…astonishing. It’s a sign of an accomplishment I never thought I would reach. The only person I knew as a child who thought I would amount to anything was my grandmother. The only person I know as an adult who is sure I could do it is my husband. I’m still not sure I can do it, even once I’ve done it. I was not raised to succeed. I was raised to breed. I wasn’t too successful at that, according to my mother, having had only one child. I am truly the black sheep of my family. Oh, well, black sheep have the benefit of being different than the ordinary, mundane sheep. I’m good with that.

I must admit, I was a little bothered by my cover. All the women on my covers have been white, but this one seemed to almost reek of whiteness. I believe in intersectionality, that there are a number of other oppressions suffered by women who are not June Cleaver, who have other axes of oppression. But I am not really bothered by my cover in the end, and I would like to explain why.

If I elected to have a woman of color on my cover, it would be usurping that which belongs to someone else. I have chosen so far to have all the women on my cover singular, working alone, writing alone. The covers are all from past eras…first, the Victorian Age, then the Flapper era, and this year, the Poodle Skirt era. Women’s lib hadn’t started (though the fight for suffrage, of course, was in full swing by the Victorian era). Women didn’t hang around in groups to do things other than “woman” things. They did them alone. In their house, if they could. They usually had to fit it in between the laundry and the shopping and the cooking and the child rearing, and sometimes they had to hide their activities from friends and family. So I have chosen not to have groups of women on the cover, not yet. It seems more…authentic. More…legitimate.

As for having a woman of color on my cover, that would not be authentic or legitimate. That would be cultural appropriation. Her story is not my story, and I don’t presume to take away her voice. There are many eloquent and talented women of color telling their stories, singing their songs, and getting their voice heard, shouting above all the noise trying to drown them out. I will not be one of those voices attempting to drown them out.

I talk about this because there have been some trends in my life lately that lead me to believe it is important to discuss. As a playwright, I have been chastised, harshly in at least one case, because my work does not include enough ‘diversity’. Well, most of my work can be as diverse as it wishes, since I only write people, and don’t write for a particular race. If someone finds something to resonate in my work, and wishes to do it, most of my works do not have anything that is specific to any race, other than the tendency for me to write in a voice that makes sense to me. You might as well say I don’t write enough women who aren’t Midwestern United States.

The other side of this, the flip side, is that when a white woman does include people of color in her works, she will again be chastised, and almost always harshly, for doing so…often by the same people who accused her of lacking diversity. The question then becomes, who owns a story? Is it the property only of those who were involved, or can others see an angle to investigate? This isn’t an easy question, and it becomes more difficult when you cut across racial and ethnic lines. Who gets to tell the story?

I am not a person who endures yelling and screaming well. It makes me upset and nervous. Then I can’t write at all. So I find myself caught…should I or shouldn’t I? Since most of the time my work is not designated for any one group, I don’t worry about it. When I include characters in my play that are designated as people of color, it’s challenging from one side of the line. When I designate white characters (even if it’s for a good reason), it’s challenging from the other side of the line. The yelling and the screaming have put me in such a state in the past that I did not write anything for many months. It took a lot to overcome the block and get back to writing.

At this point, there is no clear cut answer to the dilemma that arises between inclusiveness and appropriation. I write about poor women, but I have been one. I write about ill women, but I have been one. I write about educated women, but I am one. I write about aging women, but I am one. The stories I write, though, are not all my story. I know quite a bit about the world, or at least the part of it I’ve lived in, and I pay attention and listen. I create stories by tying together disparate threads of human experiences, and create something that is not the same story as mine, or yours, or someone else’s, but maybe ends up being a combination…or maybe something none of us have ever experienced, but that still feels familiar. My characters are not necessarily white, but they are not people of color, either. They are women. Women who live and love and hate and fear and hurt…in a few cases, perhaps women who rob or kill.

That is the thread that ties us together. Your story, my story, someone else’s story…they intersect at the woman part. There are many points of deviance within the stories; we are all women in different ways. But in the final accounting, we are all women. Some of us are nice, some are nasty. Some of us are sweet, some are cynical. Some of us are nurturing, some of us are dismissive. Some of us are compassionate, some of us don’t care. Some of us are strong, some of us are weak. Some of us are blunt, some of us are sarcastic. Some of us are all of the above, depending on what day of the week, or what month of the year, or maybe just what hour of the day it happens to be. Where we happen to be in our life. I believe that I have managed to be all of those things at some points in my life. My overall tendency is for cynical and sarcastic, but there are those moments when I can manage sweet. Nurturing, though, I have never been good at. I do what I have to do.

Over the past four years, I have invited women to join me on this writing marathon. I have offered to post the writing of other women. So far, no woman has taken me up on that. I can’t say I blame them. It’s hard. It’s painful. It requires a commitment and a drive that even someone like me finds difficult to maintain at times, and I tend to be driven, and to finish what I start. Still, it’s not easy, especially when I reach deep into my gut and pull out things I’ve chosen not to show anyone before. I am still willing to host other women, if they have something to say, even if they aren’t prepared to commit to a full month of writing.

One more thing I would like to say before I leave you to struggle through another year of whatever the hell the world throws at us this year. I am tired. I am tired of being talked down to, talked over, ignored, interrupted, mansplained, patronized, exploited, and demeaned. I am tired of the young men who drive by me while I’m out walking and tell me to go back home to my husband. I am tired of colleagues who answer questions directed at me that are in my field of expertise. I am tired of people who assume my husband is the head of the household, instead of an equal partner. I am tired of hearing people tell me things were just waiting for them to come along with their drive and their talent to do them, when they are things I tried to do years ago and met with nothing but resistance; then a male person comes along and says I want to do this, and every door opens. I am tired of being called Mrs., while the men around me are called Dr.

I used to be tired of being whistled at, groped, crowded at copy machines and grocery counters by men trying to grab a feel, pinched, and leered at. I am not tired of that anymore, because I aged out of that. Now I must inevitably face a new world, the world of the older woman, who is considered by many to be of no use anymore. I face a world where young men deride the idea that a middle aged woman could have a full rich life, even though many of us are leading fuller, richer lives than when we were younger, and in many cases, fuller richer lives than the young men mocking us. I must face the world of the woman who is no longer decorative. Being decorative was never what I wanted, and it led to little more than misery (if you doubt that, read the pieces I have written about trophy wives; those have been from the heart). Being treated like an appliance, however, is no better. So, yes, I am tired.

I am tired, but I am energized. I am energized to say NO MORE. I am energized to speak, to write, to act. I am energized to be heard.