An Unusual Graveyard

This, however, is a typical sight in Swedish cemeteries

So a couple of days ago I took my cross country skis and went just down the street to this giant field that leads to a giant park with paths through the forest and beautiful views of the Baltic Sea. (Why yes, I am bragging just a little bit. When you only get 7 hours of sunlight a day, you gotta take what you can get.) I'm very new at this, but fortunately, it's not that complicated, and since many, many Swedes had been there before me, there were nice trails already cut through the snow. So I followed them.

This is the same place where, in other seasons, I go running, and yet it looks so different under a foot of snow--etherial, otherworldly, gorgeous, you name it. And yet, after about forty minutes, I found myself in a place I'd never seen before.

It appeared gradually, as I climbed up a hill with my skis pointed to the side, leaning on my poles so that I didn't slip backwards. There, in the middle of the forest, were these small lanterns, and as I got closer, I could see snow-covered headstones. It was a cemetery, and I held my breath just a bit as I awkwardly approached, feeling as though I were walking into a poem. Probably one by Robert Frost.

When I got close enough to brush the snow from the headstones and take a closer look, however, things began to seem a bit...off. I couldn't quite put my finger on it until I found one that said (loosely translated), "To Penny. She gave me the best years of her life."

Penny, by the dates I saw, was only 16 when she died.

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File under: Missing the Point

Over at Salon, Katie Roiphe weighs in on one of this week's "issues of the moment," older parenthood, in an article entitled "The Feminist Fertility Myth." The subheading reads like so: "Why do women believe they can delay children for so long?" 

Roiphe writes in response to Judith Shulevitz's piece now up in The New Republic, and she challenges both the idea that women can "have it all" (a subject for another post, but one I successfully avoided dealing with/reading about all summer--don't get me started here) and that they

"...should be able to have children...that the world should not be withholding an experience like motherhood from you because you have dedicated yourself to your career and adventures in your 20s and 30s. We tend to view basic biology as a practicality to be surmounted, something trivial and irritating that shouldn't get in the way of the promise of a full life. It's almost as if we are shocked that nature itself has not read The Second Sex and The Feminist Mystique."

Sigh. Where to begin? As a writer, I claim the right to respond with a story. This is a story that an American woman recently told me--just last weekend, in fact. She is married to a Swede, has two children, and has raised them in both the US and Sweden, where they currently live.

Once upon a time, she said, the Swedish birth rate was one of the worst in Europe. It was bad. No one was replacing anyone else, and in a country where, post-WWII, social support structures for the elderly were becoming even more societally important, this was a problem. 

So the Swedish government did what Swedes are wont to do: they looked into the problem systematically. They found a bunch of Swedish women of childbearing age and asked them why they weren't choosing to have children. And the answer? Well, it wasn't that they felt that biology or Mother Nature owed them--it was simply that they lost too much by putting their careers on hold. They lost earning potential, they lost their ability to support themselves, they lost their identity outside of being a mother, and they got little to no help from their partners or society. So they gave it a pass.

Pragmatic as always, the Swedish government took action. They instituted some of the best parental leave requirements in the world. They made daycare accessible and affordable. They provided child support payments to make up for the loss of income while on leave (Swedes are paid a percentage of their salary by the government while out, but not the whole thing unless the company chooses to make up the difference). Most recently, they extended the mandatory (yes, extended. Yes, MANDATORY) paternal leave. If dads don't take the leave, both parents lose out. BOTH parents expect to take time off, and BOTH parents expect to return to their jobs, without penalty, when that time is over, or at least be able to look for a new position without having a black mark on their resume for the two "empty" years spent bringing up their kids. And from what I can see, what they expect is how it usually happens. (And just as a note, 'both parents' can and does cover same sex couples as well.)

And lo and behold, while it took some years, the birth rate here is currently doing pretty well. Stockholm in particular is in the middle of a little baby boom, something immediately apparent if you spend time anywhere outside of your home. And there are lots of parents--fathers and mothers both--out with their babies during the day, because they can't go to daycare until they are around two. (I told some Swedes once that lots of parents in the US have to put their kids in daycare from eight weeks or so, and they were absolutely horrified. "That's way too young!" they said. "Kids that little need their parents!" I couldn't do much but agree.)

The social message here is clear: children are important. Parents are important. They are so important that we will make sure everyone involved in bearing, birthing, and raising kids is able to keep both the little ones and themselves happy and healthy. Swedish women don't seem to have children in their mid-twenties, but they also aren't waiting around until they're forty. Early thirties seems to be it, and it seems to be working well.

The system isn't perfect. But it does NOT treat having a child as some sort of duty borne only by women, for which they (and they alone) must be willing to sacrifice their careers, earning potential, and independence. It doesn't label as selfish women who choose to establish themselves in their 20s and 30s, knowing that because of the way things work, having a child earlier would leave them (and their children!) less secure in the future.

Looking at the US from a distance, the moral tinge to this mandate (and Roiphe's article is just full of it) is even clearer to me now than it was while living there. Oh, those selfish mothers who won't make enormous sacrifices on the "appropriate" timetable. Oh, those women who think that they can have a job and thus ESCAPE BIOLOGY. Oh those future mothers trying to resist the pull of the kitchen and apron strings when we all know that their children would be better off if they'd just get back where they belong.

Look, Slate. I like you. But Roiphe is missing the point. It's not about looking at the choice many, many women are making and then condemning it as detrimental to society. It's about looking at society and asking why it can be detrimental to the point where so many women are making the same choice.

Why Are My Eyes Sad?

Not actually our tree, but still a Swedish Christmas tree.

So I bought a Christmas tree today from an Egyptian guy who had a bunch of them stuck out in the snow right by our house. It's a lovely tree, and it's currently in our apartment, upright, with two cats circling. (After all, not only is it a tree, but it came in with snow that they didn't have to go outside to experience.)

While he was wrapping it up in the tree-netting, though, after we'd discussed the relative merits of our home countries' political systems, he told me he wanted to ask me something.

Oh boy, I thought. Here we go. "Sure," I told him, preparing to turn down a date.

"Why do you have sad eyes?"

That one wasn't what I expected.

"Well, I don't know," I said finally. "I mean, I'm not actually sad."

"Ah, okay. Some people just have sad eyes. That must be it."

This wasn't the usual "Smile, gorgeous!" that creepy guys like to give women on the street now and then. And he didn't seem like a creepy guy. The conversation drifted to tree technicalities easily, and then I paid for the tree and dragged it home.

But this still begs the question: are my eyes actually sad? No one else has ever told me that. So either everyone has just been protecting me from the horrible truth, or maybe I really did look sad. The possibility that the young, lonely, cold guy who spoke no Swedish was trying to prolong the conversation and hit on me notwithstanding (my husband and my father, I know well, will pick this option), what could be causing sad-eyes?

1) Allergies. Definitely a contributing factor.

2) I'm deeply depressed but have no idea.

3) I was actually a little bummed about something just before I bought the tree and it showed on my face.

Yeah...it's number three (with a touch of number one). I didn't realize that it was going to be obvious, but as I walked from the mall to the tree place, I had just realized why I've been so reluctant to get to work this week. After a wonderfully productive retreat with the Stockholm Writers' Group, I now have a full draft. This will be (knock wood) one of the last full drafts of this book I ever write. In the new year, I'll send it off to my agent, and I hope with all sincerity that she'll then take it away to be sold.

In short, while the rest of you might get to enter this imagined world sooner rather than later, my own period of intimacy with it is almost done. For six years and change, I've been at it, off and on–but mostly on. I've spent so much time with these characters that they are as real to me as many famous real people out there I hear about but have never met. More real, even. And just now, just as I'm getting things to where I am really happy with what the book is and does, I have to send it away. Maybe it's kind of like sending a kid to preschool just after you get them toilet trained. And I do joke that I'll tell our kids (when they exist) that this book is their older sibling.

Jokes and comparision to kids aside, I know I can't be the first writer or artist to feel this way near the culmination of a large project. I'm actually pretty bad at finishing projects in general. I took a personality test once that gave you indices of how driven you supposedly are by all of these theoretically-motivating factors. And guess what I got for "Completing Things," or whatever it was called. Yes, that's right: 0. That was my lowest score, even lower than "Neatness." (Swear to god, Mom, it really was!) It's probably tied into why I write novels vs shorter pieces in the first place. This way, I get to sit with these characters and their world for years.

I wish for all possible success with this book, I really do. But it's still bittersweet to give it up.

Considering Apocalypse and Retro Culture

There's a great article just up at Longform, "The Revolutionary Energy of the Outmoded," that you can find on its original blog here. I'm still digesting every rhetorical move Christian Thorne, professor of English at Williams College, pulls when it comes to placing our '90s (and beyond, certainly, but the piece was written in 2003) near-worship of retro culture and obsession with apocalyptic films and books side by side. It's not a comparison that I would have thought to make on my own, but as I read the piece, I kept having those moments of complete recognition, the kind that make you feel kind of like an idiot for missing something that's so obvious once it's been explained to you.

And maybe it's because I'm also slowly making my way through The Gift for the first time, wherein Lewis Hyde (at least so far--don't spoil the ending!) argues that objects-as-gifts within a constant cycle of giving/receiving have a fundamentally different power and identity than objects-as-commodities as we know them in western capitalism, but what stood out to me most was this:

...[there] lies the buried aspiration of all retro-culture, even (or especially) at its most fetishistic. If you examine the signs that hang next to the objects at Restoration Hardware and other such retro-marts—these small placards that invent elaborate and fictional histories for the objects stacked there for sale—you will discover a culture recoiling from its commodities in the very act of acquiring them, a culture that thinks it can drag objects back into the magic circle if only it can learn to consume them in the right way. 

As a writer who is so often concerned with objects within my own work, and as a 30-something living in the 21st century who's necessarily been steeped in this retro-culture, reading this was less an "Aha!" moment than an "Oh. Duh." 

Thorne takes it one step further:

Underlying retro-culture is a vision of a world in which commodity production has come to a halt, in which objects have been handed down, not for our consumption, but for our care. The apocalypse is retro-culture’s deepest fantasy, its enabling wish.

I'm just skimming the surface here; the essay incorporates, the Left Behind series, Blade Runner, Delicatessen, The Truman Show, classic Chaplin-era slapstick themes, and, briefly, film noir.

I'll be giving the thoughts it's generated for me a lot more consideration myself. I'm not writing a novel set in the past, but I am writing a novel set in a foreign country and culture that is often exoticized, and idealized, in a way that's related to how we approach our reconstructed past. A large part of creating the world of 21st century Shanghai on the page, and making sure that the reader feels the same disconnect as my main character, lies in the objects that Will encounters. The objects are also implicated in the supernatural elements of the story. This and the distancing from home culture that living abroad necessarily creates seems to endow them with the kind of weight that Thorne argues we fantasize about getting from the apocalypse. The latter effect really just imposes another kind of scarcity; the former actually does, deliberately, endow them with magic of a sort.

I'd also be lying if I said that I've never considered writing an apocalyptic novel. At the moment, though, I think Octavia E. Butler has me beat out of the water before I've even made an outline, so that one's on the shelf for a bit.

I'm hooked. The essay is definitely worth a read.

A Time Before Jet Lag

I've been dipping into this massive tome by Norman Davies, Europe: A History, that a family friend gave us before we left California. This passage jumped out at me this morning:

Imagining the Middle Ages is, indeed, the problem. Historians have to stress not just what the medieval scene contained but also what it lacked. In its physical surroundings, it lacked many of the sights, sounds, and smells that have since become commonplace. There were no factory chimneys, no background traffic noise, no artificial pollutants or deodorants. Tiny isolated settlements existed in an overpowering wilderness of forest and heath, in a stillness where a church bell or the lowing of a cow could carry for miles, amidst a collection of natural but pungent whiffs from the midden and the wood fire. People's' perceptino of those surroundings lacked any strong sense of discrimination between what later times would call the natural and the supernatural, between fact and fuction, between the present and the past. Men and women had few means of verifying the messages of their senses, so all sorts of sensations were given similar credence. Angels, devils, and sprites were as real as one's neighbours. The heroes of yesterday, or of the Bible, were just as present (or as distant) as the kings and queens of one's own country. (432)

When I try to envision this particular neighborhood of the past, it's that isolation that I find most fascinating. It's true that sometimes we tend to overdo it in our conception of those times--genetic analysis, along with archeaology, makes it very clear that people have been moving and mixing for time immemorial--but for an ordinary person, especially if that person was female, life might easily be lived in an area no bigger than a day's travel. Beyond that would all be rumors, fireside stories, and hearsay.

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