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Checking in on the Masculinity Crisis

Richard T Nowitz / Getty

Kelli María Korducki | Longreads | December 2019 | 14 minutes (3,786 words)

 

Not long ago, I noticed a woman reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life at my Manhattan yoga studio as we both waited for our Ashtanga class to begin. The sight took me aback. Despite the 2018 book’s many weeks as a nonfiction bestseller, I’d somehow never considered that the scope of Peterson’s audience might extend beyond sulky white men who like to outsource their thinking. That it might include women with the disposable income and leisure time to spend their Saturday afternoons doing sun salutations, whose lives probably look a lot like mine.

Peterson, a once-unassuming psychology professor at my Canadian alma mater (I’d never heard of him during the years we were both there), has emerged in the last few years as a puzzling figurehead among men’s rights aficionados and self-help enthusiasts alike. Wielding a trademark pastiche of literary references and cherry-picked sociological data points, his writing and, to a greater extent, public lectures broadcast via YouTube deliver what is, for many in this age of ‘toxic masculinity’ and #MeToo, a reassuring story: that men are natural rulers, white privilege is a farce, and if millennial men would just make their beds and assume their kingdoms, we’d all be better off.

Peterson speaks to a constellation of loosely connected concerns that have, in the last several years, dominated popular discourse on where boys and men fit into a society in which gender norms play less and less of a role in determining how people fit together. Conversations about rape culture and damaging gender constructs take place alongside global reports of female students outperforming their male classmates. We hear of a workforce that, at least in theory, rewards the “soft skills” women are purportedly socialized to possess. Meanwhile names like “Dylann Roof” and “Elliot Rodger” have become shorthand for an epidemic of male isolation and rage. A New York Times story that followed shortly after the deadly February 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, included the observation that “about the only thing” nearly all U.S. mass shooters have in common “is that they are men.” Read more…

The Backcountry Prescription Experiment

Illustration by Natalie Nelson

Mathina Calliope | Longreads | December 2019 | 13 minutes (3,134 words)

In 2014 my doctor took me off the antidepressant I had credited with making life okay for the previous 16 years; at 41 I was trying to have a baby with my boyfriend, Inti. I didn’t get pregnant, but this story isn’t about my failure to become a mother. Instead it’s about how a break from my meds led, ultimately and circuitously, to another kind of birth; to a different life for myself.

My doctor’s orders seemed rash. Going off antidepressants is fraught, especially since so many people who want to stop taking them have been on them for so long. New guidelines are emerging that acknowledge this danger; a 2019 study in The Lancet Psychiatry recommended patients taper “over a period of months and down to amounts much lower than minimum therapeutic doses.” But my doctor was nonchalant. “You have something to be happy about now,” he quipped. “You’re trying to have a baby.” Skeptical, but with a tendency to assent to authority figures, I followed his command to stop cold turkey.

Wellbutrin (bupropion) had helped me leave a stifling marriage (though this story is also not about that). It let me dance salsa two to four nights a week through all my 30s. It gave me the energy to earn an MFA. It fueled ten-mile races, half marathons, and a marathon. It supported me throwing myself a 40th birthday party, my favorite night of my life. And the drug helped me have the clarity to see sweet, steady, easy-going Inti — my dear friend of 11 years — as more.

If the drugs didn’t fundamentally change my depression, did they, instead, by altering hormone levels, merely mask what might be a treatable source of discontent?

In addition to trying for parenthood, I had recently changed almost everything else about my life. In 2013 I had asked Inti to be my boyfriend and move in. To save money toward a house, in summer 2014, shortly after I quit meds, we put my place on Airbnb and went to live with his mother and brother. That fall I achieved a promotion at work, but the role presented unexpected challenges — not least the fact that the job itself, the career even, was not fulfilling. For the first time in more than a decade, anxiety appeared. The usual infelicities of intergenerational living — different standards of kitchen cleanliness, for example — set me on an edge that felt unwarranted. Fortunately my usual yoga, running, and dancing did a lot of the heavy lifting Wellbutrin used to do. Things were rocky, but they weren’t bleak.

A year after going off the drug, I was not quite depressed, but also not quite the same person I had been on the meds. It had become clear pregnancy wouldn’t happen without heroic measures we were disinclined to take. I grew restless and cast about for something meaningful, something, perhaps, to fill the hole I expected a baby would have filled.

Inti and I moved that January 2015 into a posher-than-necessary apartment of our own, and, with no fetus to protect, I started drinking wine socially and coffee daily again. Circumstances evened out and anxiety dissolved. Depression remained at bay, too, so there seemed no need to restart Wellbutrin. Still, something was off.

Although millions of people take antidepressants and are helped — saved, even — by them, psychoactive substances were not, in fact, first used to treat mental illness but to alter one’s state of mind, going at least as far back prehistory (e.g., chewing coca leaves). It was only later and “serendipitously,” as author and MD Marcia Angell writes in a 2011 New York Review of Books article, that scientists realized such drugs altered brain chemistry. They then hypothesized that since, for example, Thorazine, which helped patients who had schizophrenia, lowered dopamine levels, maybe a surplus of dopamine caused the condition. Similarly, since antidepressants increased serotonin and helped patients with depression, perhaps a serotonin shortage caused depression. “Thus, instead of developing a drug to treat an abnormality,” she writes, “an abnormality was postulated to fit a drug.”

Psychologist Irving Kirsch writes in his 2011 book The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth that double-blind, placebo-controlled studies of antidepressants show the drugs to be infinitesimally more effective than placebos. In other words, although many people attest to the medicines’ good, they may in fact be responding only to the placebo effect. Jerome Groopman, an M.D., notes more recently in the New Yorker that clinical trials have “stirred up intense controversy about whether antidepressants greatly outperform the placebo effect. And, while SSRIs [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors] do boost serotonin, it doesn’t appear that people with depression have low serotonin levels.” (Bupropion is not an SSRI; rather, it inhibits the reuptake of norepinephrine and dopamine.)

And if so, I wondered, who cares? The placebo effect is real. But if the drugs didn’t fundamentally change my depression, did they, instead, by altering hormone levels, merely mask what might be a treatable source of discontent? What if my problem was never my brain chemistry to begin with? What if it was my life?

One day shortly after moving into the nice apartment, I ditched work for a day hike on the Appalachian Trail, where I met a couple of backpackers who were walking the whole thing, 2,189 miles from Georgia to Maine. I admired their audacity, and the man told me, “It’s never too late.” I had never backpacked, so I almost laughed out loud. But the idea took hold.

Day hiking had always induced unequaled tranquility, in short supply in the prior year. Surely full-time forest living would do more of the same. I had read and enjoyed Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild, and Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. Theoretically I was a fan of nature. All reasonableness to the contrary, I decided to try it: A thru-hike. I would quit my job, put my furniture in my parents’ basement, break the lease on our apartment (Inti would wait for me in the house he owned with his mother), and spend from mid-April 2016 until whenever I finished, sometime in October, living in and walking through the woods. It was preposterous.
Read more…

‘To Be Well’: An Unmothered Woman’s Search for Real Love

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Vanessa Mártir | Longreads | November 2019 | 17 minutes (4,435 words)

 Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

In one of my earliest memories, my mother is leaning on the washing machine in our kitchen smoking a cigarette. She is watching her butch partner, Millie, who is on the other side of the room. Their eyes are locked. My mother smirks and takes a long drag of her cigarette. Millie walks toward her, leans her weight on my mother’s body, and kisses her. The smoke seeps out of their open mouths. I giggle and look away, blushing. 

We never talked about who Millie was to Mom or to her children. As a kid, I made Millie Father’s Day cards, complete with cardboard collar and tie. At some point, we started referring to Millie as our aunt when people asked who she was or how we were related. I was too young to understand what this meant. 

I met my now wife Katia in August 2015 at a women’s music festival in Michigan. We fell in love quickly, and when my mother heard whisperings of my relationship, she sent me cruel text messages, criticizing me for being a bad daughter and mother. 

She didn’t ask me who Katia was or if she was good to me. 

“Les di un mal ejemplo,” she said.  

I deleted her messages without responding and blocked her when they got to be too much. 

I married Katia on May 10th of this year. My mother was not there. I didn’t invite her, but she wouldn’t have come even if I had.

My relationship with Katia is the first where I am not clawing for the love of an emotionally unavailable person, like I’ve done so many times in the past, repeating the “love me, please love me” cycle I learned from my relationship with my mother. This doesn’t matter to my mother. It doesn’t matter that Katia shows up for me, is supportive, kind, and reliable. It doesn’t matter that Katia loves my daughter, so much so that she included her in her wedding vows, turning to her and promising to love her and be there for her like her own. 

All that matters to my mother is that Katia is a woman. 

* * *

My mother and I have never been close. She was abusive and harsh when I was growing up, and I learned early on that no one could protect me from her. Not even Millie, though she tried. I left to attend boarding school at 13 and never returned. 

Boarding school was my way out. At 13 I had to leave to save my own life. 

She’s been in and out of my life since. Whenever I disobey her or don’t live my life the way she thinks I should, which is often, she punishes me by denying me her love. 

She’s done this so many times, leaving me longing for her love. A friend asked me recently, “How many times have you lost your mother?” The question connotes that I had her love at some point. It pains me to say it, and I feel so much guilt writing this, but the truth is I’ve never felt like I had my mother’s consistent love. Not as a child. Not as an adult. But nothing exists in a vacuum. I know my mother is unable to mother me because of her own trauma. 

* * *

My mother was raised in Honduras in the kind of poverty we only see in Save the Children commercials. She once told me a story of when she was 11 years old. She’s sitting on the latrine. It looks like the one I used on my first trip to Honduras when I was 9. I was a spoiled Americana who had only used a toilet that flushed so I didn’t have to look at where the stuff went. The toilets at home were white and eddied the business away. This thing was a black, bottomless hole where I imagined all sorts of vermin squirmed, waiting for an unsuspecting child like me for them to grab and chew on. The wooden planks of the shack were old and splintered, black in parts where the moisture had seeped into the grain, which was now growing mold. You could peek out in spots where the wood had warped. Mom is sitting on the wooden top, no toilet seat to protect her rear, but by this time she knew how to sit so the splinters didn’t dig into her. She’s grown immune to the stench and the frightening thoughts of what’s festering in that hole. She’s swinging her skinny legs, elbows propped on her knees, face in her hands. She’s scarred from mosquito bites and so many falls. She picks at a scab and wonders what they’ll eat that night. Tortillas y frijoles, for sure. The staple diet de los pobres. She hopes her abuelita Tinita has scrounged enough to buy at least a piece of meat. Un pollito o una carnesita de res dripping in fat and juices. It’s been so long since Mom ate meat. That’s when she feels the shudder in her stomach, like something is moving, slithering. Then she starts to choke. Something has lodged in her throat so she can’t breathe in or out. She kicks the flimsy wooden door of the latrine. Her worn-too-many-times panties and shorts are still around her ankles. Her T-shirt is still rolled up above her belly button. Abuelita, who is sitting on a stool in the patio shelling beans, runs to her and shoves her hand into Mom’s mouth. Mom gags but nothing comes up. Tinita shoves her fingers deeper until she feels it. She grabs hold and yanks, pulls out a tapeworm two feet long. Mom falls back onto the dirt, sweating and heaving.

Mom told me stories of her childhood when she wanted to me to see how good I had it. When she was calling me ungrateful. Stories about how she ran barefoot to school in the morning because shoes were a luxury so the one pair she had were saved for special occasions. If she was late, she would have no milk for the day. It was powdered and tasted like chalk, and bugs floated on the top of the yellow liquid. But they drank it because it was the only milk they had.

Mom told me stories of her childhood when she wanted to me to see how good I had it.

Then there was the story of her muñequita. The Catholic Church up the road gave Christmas gifts to the children in the barrio. They were donated by charities from overseas, but by the time the load reached the barrio, the rich had taken their pick from the lot. So one year, Mom was given just a doll’s head. She had a mass of brown curls and big blue eyes. It was the only doll Mom had.

A few days later, Mom woke to find that Abuelita had fashioned a body for the doll using rags she sewed together and stuffed with leaves and dirt. She made the doll a dress out of one Mom had outgrown. Mom slept with that doll for years. She cried every single time she told that story.

We were poor growing up, but for us poverty meant living in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that was a pile of rubble, in an apartment with walls that chipped and flaked in chunks, giving me asthma and my brother lead poisoning. Poverty for us meant not having the latest kicks and not being able to go on school trips that cost money. 

Poverty for my mother meant hunger. It meant watching her baby sister have seizures and die because they didn’t have access to adequate health care. When my mother told me this story, she clawed her hands and flailed her arms to show me como le brincaba el cuerpo a la niña, who was not yet a year old. 

Poverty for my mother meant hunger and being unmothered. 

My grandmother started working at 5 years old. When she had her children, she worked as a maid for wealthy families who lived in gated mansions surrounded by the shacks of the poor. Three of Abuela’s children died as a result of poverty. Six months after one of her daughters died, the infant my mother saw convulse, she left Honduras for good. She moved to Puerto Rico with the Turkish family she was working for. My mother, who was then 9, was left with her grandmother Tinita. My mother has said: Tinita fue mi madre. She didn’t see her birth mother for five years. 

Hunger taught Mom that life was brutal but she didn’t imagine it could be worse in this country. Nothing could have prepared her.

* * *

My mother was 15 when she arrived to the U.S. She hadn’t been here two days before her mother’s husband started molesting her. She still had Honduran soil under her fingernails. 

My brother was conceived in that rape. My grandmother blamed my mother. My mother has never gotten over what happened to her. I know that’s why she couldn’t and still can’t mother me. 

I am unmothered because my mother was unmothered. 

* * *

 

As a kid, when I watched Claire Huxtable and Elyse Keaton on TV and saw the mothers and their children in my neighborhood, I often wondered why my mother wasn’t like them. Yes, she fed and clothed me, and made sure I had a roof over my head, but she wasn’t tender or affectionate. 

Once when I was 5 or 6, I went with her to El Faro, the supermarket on the corner. I reached up for her hand to cross the street and she swatted me away. “Porque siempre tienes que estar encima de mi?” That memory still makes me wince. 

* * *

 

Months into my relationship with Katia, my aunt had a dinner for the family. I decided not to attend because I knew my mother would be there, but my daughter begged to go. 

I saw my mother standing in front of the building as soon as we turned the corner. I told Katia to park behind a large van so my mother couldn’t see us. Moments after my daughter got out of the car, I heard my mother. 

“Where’s your mother? Tell her to come. Tell her to come.” The bass in her voice increased with each “Tell her to come.” I couldn’t see her face, but I know that roar. As a kid it would send me running up into the plum tree in our backyard. 

I told Katia to hit the gas. I watched my mother yell and flail her arms in the rearview mirror. I later found out she cornered my daughter to interrogate her. 

This is how Katia met my mother. She drove us to a nearby park where I sobbed into her chest. 

* * *

I spent much of my life trying to win my mother’s love. I know now that she did the best she could with what she had, but the little girl I was didn’t get what she needed, and the young woman I was still suffered for that love well into adulthood. 

Once when I was 5 or 6, I went with her to El Faro, the supermarket on the corner. I reached up for her hand to cross the street and she swatted me away. ‘Porque siempre tienes que estar encima de mi?’ That memory still makes me wince.

I repeated the “love me, please love me” cycle for a long time after leaving my mother’s house. I broke my heart countless times as a result, falling for people who were emotionally unavailable like my mother. I even repeated the cycle in my friendships. 

It wasn’t until my college graduation that I finally saw it: Nothing I did would ever be enough for her. 

I was still wearing the blue gown with the Columbia University crown stitched onto the lapel. I’d asked my drug dealer then-boyfriend, one of a string of terrible decisions, not to come because I didn’t want to incite my mother. We went to an Italian restaurant not far from campus. Most of my family was there — my aunt, grandmother, sister, cousins. We were eating when I told them that I’d decided not to go to law school, a decision I’ve never regretted. I was going to take a year off to work and figure out my next move. My mother slammed her fork so hard, the entire table shook. She glared at me and said: “Yo sabía que tú no ibas a ‘cer ni mierda con tu vida.” 

I’d like to say that this was the moment I stopped trying to please her, but that would be a lie. That wound walks with me always.

* * *

When my brother died in 2013, I reeled into the darkest place of my life. People say that the death of a loved one is the greatest loss. No one tells you about the griefs that grief will uncover. No one tells you how those griefs will suffocate you. 

The grief that came hurtling at me was my mother wound. I had to face it. I had to give it a name: I am an unmothered woman. You can’t take on or heal what you haven’t named. This was the beginning of my healing journey. 

I dedicated myself to my healing: I went to therapy, I wrote, I hiked, I worked out, I created art, I did what I needed to be well. It was two years and three months later that I met Katia. I realize now that I was finally ready for a love that I’d never known. A reliable, supportive, I-gotchu love. I’m still learning how to receive it and nurture it. The image of love I’d been taught is so very different from the real thing. 

* * *

The next time I saw my mother was a year later at my cousin’s baby shower. I knew she would be there but I decided to go anyway, with my daughter and Katia. 

At first she ignored me and pretended not to care, but once I ran into her alone in the stairwell, she fell apart. My mother is a tiny woman who’s been dealt a hard hand in life. That doesn’t give her a pass. 

In that moment, the angry woman was gone, replaced by a frail, broken child. 

“I miss my daughter,” she said, smoothing her hand on my cheek. It was the most tender she’d been with me for years. My chest caved. “What happened, Vanessa?”

“I can’t let you hurt me anymore, ma,” I said. I didn’t try to explain myself or defend my partner and our love. It was devastating to see her so broken. I’ve had to remind myself many times since that choosing me was and still is the right thing to do. 

She refused to let me introduce her to Katia. “I’m not ready,” she said. Katia was unfazed. She’s been out since she was 16 and doesn’t need my mother’s approval. It’s me who still wants it, though I know that may never happen. 

Later, my mother started downing shots of tequila. I watched her, knowing what happens when she does this. When she asked me to take her to the bathroom, she had a crazed, faraway look in her eyes. She was slurring her words and bumping into people. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and splashed water on her face. Before long, she was back in that space I remember from childhood, what I’ve learned is a psychotic episode. 

She doesn’t remember any of it — how she cried and talked about the man who raped her, “ese degracia’o.” She sobbed when she spoke of my brother. “I miss my son,” she said over and over. Her pain raw and palpable. 

Katia held her hair while she threw up. “You remind me so much of Millie,” she said, looking up at Katia, bits of half digested food on her chin.

“But I’m not her,” Katia responded as she held my mother up so she wouldn’t fall into her own vomit. 

It’s been three years since that day. I’ve seen my mother only a handful of times since. 

* * *

My mother was a Jehovah’s Witness when she met Millie. She went to the apartment of the sister of an elder, and there was Millie. Mom says she was sitting in a living room filled with women talking and drinking and dancing, when Millie sat next to her. “Do you know what’s going on here?” Millie asked. 

I imagine my mother, all of 23 with three children. She had gone through so much in the few years since she’d been in the U.S. She found community, hope, and maybe even redemption in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but she was still very naive about the world. Millie saw this and started pursuing her. 

She’d roll up on her bike when we were walking in the street. We’d come home to find Millie hanging out on the stoop of our building. My brother, who was 5, remembered Millie inviting herself in one day. A short while later, she moved in and that December we celebrated our first Christmas. This was Brooklyn, 1978. I was 3 years old. 

* * *

Though my mother and Millie were together throughout my childhood, my mother remained conflicted. I know this because when I was in sixth grade, she put me in Jehovah’s Witness Bible studies classes. 

At first, I was ever the serious student. I did all the assignments, read the biblical stories and scriptures, answered the questions, reflected on the lessons, and went to the Kingdom Hall on Sundays. God became my everything. So much so that my sixth grade writing teacher took me aside once and said, “It’s beautiful that you have such a great love for God, Vanessa, but you have to write about something else.” 

I kept at it. I imagine that somewhere in my mind, I thought: Maybe this will make Mom love me. 

It was all good until I started questioning the teachings. I hadn’t admitted to anyone that my moms were in a lesbian relationship. I didn’t realize it myself until I was in fifth grade and a student told me butch means lesbian. 

I think I knew. I think I just didn’t want to know. 

When Caroline, the sister who gave us the Bible studies classes, started talking about love and relationships, I asked: “What does the Bible say about love between women?”

Caroline raised her eyebrows. “The Bible says we should all love one another.”

I pushed. “But what does the Bible say about women who love each other like a man and woman love each other?”

Caroline looked around our small living room at the pictures on the walls. Pictures of my family. Pictures of me and Millie and my sister and brother and my mom. “The Bible says it’s a sin.” For homework she had me read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. 

That’s when I started to rebel. 

See, the one who loved me, who showed me tenderness, who held me up, who whispered in my ear that I was going to be somebody, was Millie. When I became obsessed with basketball when I was 9, she nailed a bike rim to a splintered board and put it up in the backyard. Then she went out and bought me an official Spalding basketball. When I wanted a bike when I was 10, she went around the neighborhood junkyards and built me a bike out of the pieces she gathered. The body was sparkling purple, one wheel was yellow, the other blue, the seat was a cracked white leather, and the grips, which were peeling away, were a pretty aqua blue. The kids made fun of me and called it Rainbow Bike, but I rode it like it was a king’s chariot. 

I was too young to understand the complexities of queerness and what it meant to be gender nonconforming, so when Caroline said what she said about love between women, it was Millie I thought of. Millie was the one who would grab the brim of her Kangol cap and say, “Yo soy butch.” The way she said it, it was like she was dancing salsa but just with her shoulders. 

See, the one who loved me, who showed me tenderness, who held me up, who whispered in my ear that I was going to be somebody, was Millie.

But I couldn’t accept that Millie was sinful. She was the one who loved me. 

I started questioning everything Caroline said. If she tried to teach me another portion of the Bible, I went back to Sodom and Gomorrah. I demanded that she explain. When she showed me the scriptures, I shook my head and said, “No. I don’t believe it.” 

One day, frustrated and hurt, I yelled, “Well, who wrote the bible and who says God told them to write it?”

Caroline looked at me, her eyes sad and resigned. Without another word, she packed her things and never came back. 

Mom beat me that night. She didn’t say why, but I knew. 

* * *

Mom told me once about how Abuela confronted her about being with a woman. They were in a train station when my mother stood up to Abuela. Abuela who didn’t mother her. Abuela who accused her of seducing her husband. “Me ganó la cara,” Mom said. In the scene I imagined, they are in the Wilson Street L train station near where we lived then in Bushwick. They are standing in the turnstile, the wooden bar between them. I hear the roar of the train and I see my mother’s face. The red handprint on her cheek. She is glaring at her mother. That was the day my mother decided to stay with Millie, “por rebeldía.”

My mother thinks I am with Katia to be rebellious. To spite her. 

* * *

“I was never gay, m’ija,” she once told me. “It’s just that Millie was there for me.” 

Theirs was a violent and tumultuous relationship, but my mother agrees, “Of all my children, Millie loved you.” So, it’s not completely surprising that once I embraced my queerness, I fell in love with a butch.

* * *

I saw my mother this past March. I invited her to my house for the first time since Katia and I moved in together three and a half years ago. It was my turn to host the monthly family brunch, a tradition my aunt started a while back. 

A few weeks before, Mom hosted the brunch in her house and called to invite me. When we hung up, she texted, “you can invite your friend.” I laughed but didn’t address it. By then she knew Katia and I were engaged and had talked a lot of shit that I ultimately ignored. 

That’s the thing about the mother wound, even when you know it’s dangerous, you still hold out hope that the relationship will change. That your mother will one day mother you. 

We had a good time at the brunch in her house. My mother was decent, even kind. She and Katia talked and joked. Katia was sick with a bad cold and had to leave early. Mom sent me home with Tupperware full of food for Katia. The next day, Mom texted to ask how Katia was doing. 

It was progress. So when it was my turn to host brunch, I invited my mother. 

The day started with drama. She said she lost her keys and couldn’t come. I was distraught. I had doña cleaned my house the week leading up to it. Mopping and wiping and moving furniture and ensuring my house was in tip-top condition. I didn’t say this aloud but I know why — I wanted my mother’s approval. 

I woke up super early to cook a lavish meal. We bought steaks to grill on the deck. I had Katia buy champagne and gallons of orange juice to make mimosas. 

Mom came in hours late, after we’d all eaten and had several drinks. She walked in criticizing. She didn’t like that I lived on a hill. She didn’t like where I live because you have to walk down a path at the side of the house to get to the entryway then up a narrow set of stairs to get to our apartment on the third floor. She said I pay way too much rent. “Why don’t you buy a house already?” She told me to close my writing room door because she didn’t like the pictures I had posted. This was the room I cleaned the deepest, that I was most excited to show her. I shook my head. “You can move,” I said and kept talking to the family. 

I had doña cleaned my house the week leading up to it. Mopping and wiping and moving furniture and ensuring my house was in tip-top condition. I didn’t say this aloud but I know why — I wanted my mother’s approval.

She said my plants needed watering. I needed to change the soil. She was surprised I had a bag of soil on hand. She showed me how to repot one of them. The plant has thrived since she put her hands on it. 

She wasn’t there two hours before it happened. The topic of the wedding came up and I started talking excitedly about our plans when she demanded that I stop. She said it was disrespectful of me to discuss it in front of her. She called me malcriada. It was then that I saw in real time all the healing I’ve done over the past few years. I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t flip out. “You cannot take away my joy,” I said. 

She stormed out. I haven’t seen or spoken to her much since. 

I married Katia on May 10th, surrounded by the people who love and support us — Katia’s family, her mom, siblings, a few cousins; my chosen family including my sister friends. my mother’s sister and brother, and my abuela. 

Yes, I wish my mother was there. 

Yes, I wish my mother would accept my relationship. 

Yes, I wish she could mother me, but the fact is that she can’t, and though it pains me, I’ve gone no-contact for now. 

It hurts to not have her in my life, but it hurts more when she’s present and in my life. 

Thankfully, I’ve learned that I can make something beautiful out of my suffering: I can start the Writing the Mother Wound Movement, and I can help people write and publish their stories about their fraught relationships with their mothers. 

The greatest thing that has come out of this work, however, is this: My daughter is not unmothered. She walked me down the aisle, though she made it clear: “I’m not giving you away, but I’m willing to share you.” 

This is the love I’m reclaiming. This is how I’ve learned to mother myself. 

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson

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Vanessa Mártir is a NYC based writer and educator. She has been widely published, including in The Washington Post, The Rumpus, Bitch Magazine, and the NYTimes Bestseller Not That Bad, edited by Roxane Gay. She is the creator of the Writing Our Lives Workshop, which she teaches online and in NYC, and the Writing the Mother Wound Movement. 

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Obsession and Release: 10 Years to Write a Longread

Tim Requarth and James K. Williamson

Relative to the time required to read them, #longreads take far longer to write. In the first episode for a new series on The Longreads Podcast, Head of Fact-checking Matt Giles interviews James K. Williamson and Tim Requarth about pieces they recently published after years of incubation, research, and writing.

Tim Requarth is a science journalist and a lecturer in science and writing at New York University. Longreads published his essay, “The Final Five Percent,” in October. Requarth worked on the story for 10 years. It chronicles his brother Conway’s brain injury and subsequent change in personality, as he becomes more violent and eventually lands in jail. Requarth weaves in his own PhD studies in neuroscience and the ramifications of bringing neuroscience into the courtroom. Read more…

Downsizing in the Shadow of Disaster

Ghost Ship warehouse fire memorial mural
Local artist Norman Vogue works on a mural dedicated to the victims of the deadly Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland, California. The mural includes the names of the 36 people killed in the fire. (Anda Chu / Bay Area News Group / Getty Images)

In Harper’s Magazine, Wes Enzinna writes about living in a 32-square-foot shack behind a friend’s ex-boyfriend’s house in Oakland in 2016, the year of the Ghost Ship warehouse fire. Struggling to find personal solutions they can afford amidst the country’s worst housing crisis, Enzinna and his friends try to live within their means by downsizing what they need to live and dwelling in dangerous makeshift spaces that threaten their health, well-being, and, when disaster strikes, their lives.

“It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out,” George Orwell wrote in Down and Out in Paris and London. “You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.”

The powerful thing about smallness, it occurred to me, isn’t actually smallness for its own sake—the point, instead, is a matter of scale. If you reduce the size of your life enough, then the smallest change can be a profound improvement. Yet the hardest thing is to recognize your smallness without being diminished by it. In my shack I was always balancing that tension—I didn’t want to become so small that I disappeared, I just wanted to hide for a little while.

Everyone was sick with sadness following the fire. I saw survivors at bars, their eyebrows singed off. I chatted with old pals at parties and realized they were talking about their girlfriends or boyfriends in the past tense, as if they were ghosts, because they were. There was talk of suicide, songs about suicide, attempts at suicide that failed and attempts that succeeded. Jenny cried every time we hung out.

In the end, I lived in the shack for eleven months. It shrank to the size of a cage. Living like an animal was no longer liberating. I grew tired of waking up in damp, soiled T-shirts. The weeds by my bed grew head-high. The skunk birthed a litter and left me. My mind a fog, I kept accidentally kicking over my pee jar. Living on so little had exacted a heavy toll.

Being down-and-out is cheap, sure, but the things you do to stand it become expensive, whether drink, drugs, or whatever other vice gets you through the night.

Read the story

Let Me Show You the World

aladdin's magic lamp with human figures sharing stories in the background
Illustration by Cat Finnie

Iman Sultan | Longreads | November 2019 | 16 minutes (4,062 words)

 

In Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin, released back in May, Princess Jasmine finds herself in the clutches of the palace guards after Jafar has taken over the throne and stripped her father, the rightful Sultan, of his majestic turban. Trapped in a moment of doe-eyed silence and unable to reverse her situation, Jasmine is dragged away in a dreamlike sequence. Then, in a striking departure from the 1992 animated film of the same name, she suddenly breaks out into song.

“Written in stone, every rule, every word,” she sings. “Centuries old and unbending. Stay in your place, better seen and not heard. But now that story is ending…”

In the age of Disney live-action remakes, Aladdin has shattered the box office and proven the commercial viability of the genre. Bringing in a little over a billion dollars in worldwide ticket sales, and with a sequel already under discussion, Aladdin revealed to the public that a diverse cast, strong female leads, and a reformed Disney isn’t just good for the culture. It’s also — if not primarily — good for business.

A dizzying, colorful, and high-budget romp, 21st-century Aladdin tries to do it all: the leads are of Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian descent. Will Smith plays a genie who yearns for freedom. Naomi Scott reimagines Jasmine as an unbending, dignified princess who claims political agency and saves her kingdom from the impending doom of the evil Jafar.

“I saw her as a young woman, not a teenager, with a mature strength that can cut you down,” the British-Gujarati actress told British Vogue. “So I said to them, ‘Just to let you know, I want to play her strong, and if that’s not what you’re looking for, that’s okay, but it’s not for me.’”

Aladdin is seemingly designed to transcend feminist or antiracist criticism by embodying diversity and “strong” womanhood itself. The filmmakers created a near-identical copy of the animated film with tweaks that, in the words of producer Dan Lin, proved Disney “could create a movie that was both diverse and inclusive” as well as “wildly commercial.” Arabic interjections like yalla are casually heard in the background; the Genie seems to riff his dance moves off of Bollywood choreography; elaborate costumes echo elements from South Asian, Kurdish, and Turkish clothing; and the controversial lyrics of the opening song, “Arabian Nights,” shift from “barbaric” (in the 1992 version) to “chaotic.”

And yet, despite these touches, the essence of the remake remains near-identical: it blends cultures together, distorts the source material, and uses “Arabian Nights” as a song title that sets the atmosphere of a film that ultimately takes place in a fictional world. But the world of Aladdin, the storytelling behind it, and the rich tradition of orally passing down tales across generations in Southwest Asia are not fictional — they’re real.

Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

A wooden empty chair in the middle of an empty room with a decorated checkerboard floor - stock photo (Photo By Busà Photography via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Lakeidra Chavis, Jodi S. Cohen, Jennifer Smith Richards, Heidi Blake, Zandria F. Robinson, Michael Hall, and Eve Peyser.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Open Secrets: Celebrity Sexuality and Athletic Abuse

Getty Images

Editor-in-Chief Mike Dang, Contributing Editor Danielle Jackson, Culture Columnist Soraya Roberts, and The Believer’s Deputy and Co-Interview Editor Niela Orr share what they’ve been reading and working on.

This week, the editors discuss the gender politics of music criticism, how young womxn drive conversations around cultural figures, a new memoir by Whitney Houston’s best friend, and institutionalized discrimination in sport.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


1:31 Longreads’ upcoming Hive music series written by womxn. 

5:02 A Song for You: My Life with Whitney Houston by Robyn Crawford

9:30 Loving and Losing Whitney Houston: Robyn Crawford Speaks (November 20, 2019, Talking Red Table Talk Podcast) 

16:43 Robyn Crawford Opens up to Lena Waithe About Her Relationship With Whitney Houston (November 12, 2019, Oprah Magazine)

21:00 The Longreads team’s favourite Whitney Houston songs.

25:19  I Was the Fastest Girl in America, Until I Joined Nike. (Mary Cain, November 7, 2019, The New York Times)

Inside the Toxic Culture of the Nike Oregon Project ‘Cult.’ (Chris Chavez, November 13, 2019, Sports Illustrated)

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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

This Is How You Lose Your Mind

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Dani Fleischer | Longreads | November 2019 | 11 minutes (2,731 words)

There’s no single answer to the question of why I lose my mind at the beginning of my sophomore year of college. There are just things that happen over the years, and those things accumulate over time, and those accumulations finally break me. Like the crack of a whip, it’s loud and startling, and it feels like it comes out of nowhere.

It doesn’t.

***

I spend my whole life aiming for academic perfection, starting when I am 10 — the year my father tanks another job and my parents move me and my older sisters down to New Jersey from upstate New York. It’s the second time in a decade they’ve made that particular move, under eerily similar conditions: a lost job, a desperate reach, an uprooted family.

But there’s another condition too — a preexisting one that comes before anything else I can remember: this strange suspicion I have that I am somehow deficient. Being the new kid in 5th grade only exacerbates this vague and amorphous feeling of not-enoughness. It makes me painfully quiet at school and slow to make friends.

Each morning, during journal-writing time, I ask for the blue laminated bathroom pass and go to the bathroom, to the last stall on the right, and I cry. I’m not even sure why I’m crying but I know it has something to do with the sadness that’s bundled up inside me. Nobody ever told me it would be this lonely, I keep thinking. Then, after a few minutes, I pick the blue index card off the dirty tile floor, splash some water on my face, and return to class. It’s a secret ritual that goes on for months.

Then this happens: I become the first 5th grader who can properly fill out a map of all 50 states, and something temporarily replaces that not-enoughness. I don’t even know what it is exactly, but the urge to steal away to a bathroom subsides for the week, and I spend the rest of the year chasing that feeling. State capitals, vocabulary words like doldrums and oxymoron, letters to Elie Wiesel: there’s so much to try to be the best at, and that pursuit carries me straight into summer. It turns out to be a good year for me. I adapt. I make friends, get straight A’s, and begin to feel comfortable in Jersey.

A few days before 6th grade starts, I find out that we’re moving back upstate again. The reasoning my parents give is muddled: the house upstate never sold, and Mom doesn’t like living so close to her mother. I begin to wonder about how the decisions shaping my life are being made.

I return upstate and bring with me the comfort of academic perfection. School becomes the perfect closed system, a way to quantify my worth, and for a long time that system serves me well. I’m good at it and it seems as good as anything else by which to define myself; it’s rigid and unforgiving, and it doesn’t account for my own humanity. The perfect vehicle for self-destruction: something that feels like control, but isn’t. A car speeding down an icy highway late at night.

I spend high school grinding away at perfection and show myself no mercy when I graduate second in my class. I still get to make a speech at graduation, which is nice. I quote Rilke and people congratulate me and I feel smart, even as I continue to eviscerate myself for not being first.

I get into a good college.
Read more…

Borrowed Babies

Archival photographs courtesy of the New York State College of Home Economics records, #23-2-749. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY.

Jill Christman | Iron Horse Literary Review | Spring 2013 | 41 minutes (8,219 words)

 

Cooking, the science of foods, budget-making, house beautifying, dressmaking and a knowledge of textiles, all of these subjects have been considered essential to the teaching of home economics but the art of babies has until this late date been left to theory, and Providence. Now, however, schools of home economics are adding a new branch of study to their curriculum—practical mothercraft. —“Apprenticing for Motherhood,” Today’s Housewife (July 1924)

 

Just weeks after the level-two ultrasound, almost five months pregnant, I booked a ticket to Syracuse, New York, where I was to pick up a rental at the airport and drive up to Ithaca. I had a grant to do research in the human ecology archives of the Cornell library, and I was scheduled to be there for three weeks. Alone. Ithaca is lovely in the summer, I told myself, and archives are like treasure hunts for nerdy people.

I should have been giddy with anticipation, but I was not. I was miserable and terrified and lonely. I didn’t want to go. Now, I recognize this as one of the most unstable times of my life, hormonally speaking, and with all of the chemical changes happening inside my body, I couldn’t cope with change on the outside. I wanted to hunker down. I wanted a box of Wheat Thins, some lemonade with fizzy water, my couch, my dogs, my husband Mark, and another episode of The Baby Story. 

Read more…