I. Me
Last fall, when I found out that my stepmother was having a baby, my first thought was one that, as a feminist, I’m ashamed to admit. With guilt tightening in my chest, I clenched my fists and hoped, “Please don’t let the baby be a girl.”
I think women have it tougher: there, I’ve said it. And that is why I wished for a baby brother.
Some of you will undoubtedly disagree with this sentiment, and surely men face their own set of societal problems, but this essay is not about that. This essay is about the fact that at one point in my life I found it so difficult to be a woman that I didn’t want someone I loved–or would love, once those cells coalesced into a being–to have to go through life as a woman.
I don’t consider myself a casualty of “the patriarchy,” but sometimes I do feel victimized—particularly when walking home by myself late at night, or when wondering how many dates is a ‘proper’ amount to wait to sleep with someone. I do not want to be a victim—I am strong and independent, a modern woman—but sometimes I do feel like one, and that confuses and upsets me. I live in a time and place that is arguably one of the best for a young woman in this world to live. I come from a family who never made me feel that my gender was an obstacle. I went to a college where “dismantling heteronormativity” was brunch conversation. But I guess this essay isn’t about all that either.
This is about the endless amount of small things–things the world expects of me, and that I have come to expect of myself, because I wear my femaleness with skepticism. It is about the minor battles that I wage with myself every day because I have been taught one thing by society but have come to believe another. The feminism blogs I read are constantly taking swipes at each other–no one can seem to come to an agreement on whether or not “hook-up culture” is bad, for example. And so, equipped with feminist texts and fashion magazines and my own canon of disjointed experiences, I am left to figure these things out on my own.
This is weird to say, especially at 22, but I was made an older sister again today. Finally, after much hand-wringing and the seemingly endless screaming fights and disappointments, my stepmom had a baby today. Her name is Madeleine Teresa, and though I have yet to meet her (she came just one day after I was home!), I can tell from the pictures that she is quite adorable.
Since Maddie was just born today, I’m not really finished processing or parsing all of the complicated emotions that go along with having this beautiful, wrinkly ball of loveliness pop right into your nucleic family, one that you have known your whole life as just a two-sibling family. I’m not angry or jealous, though I think a lot of people I’ve told have expected me to be. I’m actually just really, really happy, so happy that I’ve booked a ticket to fly home AGAIN (the second 6,000 mile trip in two weeks) July 3rd-5th to meet her. I couldn’t be more excited.
In honor of her birth, I unearthed the diary I kept when I was in 2nd grade. At 7 years old, I reminisced about the birth of my other little sister, Alison, which happened when I was 4. The entry is adorable, and I’m going to post it here. It’s so straightforward, and it says everything I’m really capable of saying about this right now:
What it was like when I got Ali went like this:
My parents called the house and I answered the phone. I said Hi and they said Hi back. They also told me I had a baby sister. At that moment I was so excited I fell over. My grammy got ready and we went to the hospital and me and my grammy waited for almost an hour. The doors to the baby room were locked. Finally my dad came and opened the doors. My baby sister Alison was so cute! I love her.
My mother has gone off of her antidepressants, and while I won’t tell her this, it has made me like her less.
“Since you’ve gone off of your medicine,” I start.
“Oh, come on–”
“No, just let me finish! Since you’ve gone off your medicine, you have more of an edge. You’re harder, somehow.”
She sighs. “I began to realize that the only thing Wellbutrin did for me was make me take shit from people when I shouldn’t.”
The notion that we have grown better because and not in spite of the pills we take every day is difficult to accept without feeling defeated, somehow. That the best version of me is possible only because of the medicine I take sometimes makes me want to cry. Each evening before bed, resigned, I take a blue pill in the shape of an oval. Each morning I wake up and I feel okay.
I don’t know how to explain the change in my mother. It’s subtle, which is what makes it so difficult to talk about. I watch her move defiantly from one room of the house to another. That it’s–there! She moves now as if daring you to challenge her; she has lived with the numbness of the medicine and refuses to go back there again. Simple questions evoke unnecessarily biting answers. My mother has gone off her antidepressants–suddenly, without tapering–and this has made her mean. It has been five weeks.
Last night I dreamed that the earth shook. I also dreamed that a random New York taxi driver threw a huge bag of weed at me, but that part makes far less sense.
I was in an apartment in San Francisco with bright white ornamental doorframes, and when I felt the earth begin to shake I grabbed my sister from the bed she was sleeping in and made us both stand clutching the doorframe until it stopped. Afterwards I was afraid I had imagined the whole thing, so I Googled “San Francisco earthquake” on my Blackberry, and thankfully the US Geological Survey confirmed that I had not hallucinated the event. The earthquake was a magnitude 4.
It’s unsurprising that I doubted the legitimacy of the quake even in my dream, since I have a pretty irrationally intense fear of them. When my ex and I were planning our move out to SF, I made him fill out an “Earthquake Preparedness Worksheet” with me so that we could insulate his apartment from earthquake damage. We also planned to meet at the Southeast entrance of the 24th St. Mission BART station in the event of a natural disaster. I still wonder sometimes if, when the Big One hits, either of us will show up now that we no longer love each other.