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FinalAssignmentPaper.docxASSIGNMMENT INSTRUCTION
In this final major assignment you are to write a 2500 word personal essay in which you address each of the topics introduced in these essays: policing in America, the public school system, and issues with parenting in our increasingly strange new world. You must cite (using MLA citations and an MLA Works Cited page) each of the three essays included in the course. You can approach this assignment in several ways.
1. Discuss each of the issues are you have personally experienced them focusing on a specific moment: when you were pulled over, an assignment in a high school class, and an especially difficult day parenting in these days of co-vid/work/school. (You can discuss watching parents, or watching a moment with a teacher. If you have never spoken to a police officer, you can include a real moment from TV [not a fictional story]).
2. Discuss each of the issues from a moment you have seen of television: i.e. the day you first saw what happened with Mr. Floyd, a statement Betsy DeVoss has made about public school, a parent writing about how hard it is to parent these days. If you write based on what you seen and read, make sure to cite (using MLA) where you got you information, where you saw the video, where you read the blog, etc.
3. The big thing is to be as specific as possible - tell stories that take place in a specific moment. Don't tell us what would happen (as in day in day out) tell us what did happen on a specific day. Include sensory details - sight, smell, taste, sound, touch. Use the sources from the class! This is a major part of the grade as is your use of MLA.
4. In general, you want to make statement about your wishes for improvements in these areas; having said that, you do not have to make a political statement. This can be a completely personal essay in which you are simply sharing your experiences with the world so that the world might really know what it's like to walk in your shoes. Avoid being combative or strident in your essay. Tempered anger can be useful but yelling on paper isn't. Imagine that you are talking to someone who wants to hear your experiences and is an interested and curious reader. Try to get this in by Jan. 6 at midnight.
5. There is an Example A paper posted below this assignment.
6. Write with any questions you might have for this assignment. I look very forward to reading your essays.
Literature Rubric
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Literature Rubric |
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Criteria |
Ratings |
Pts |
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This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeCONTENT |
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30 pts |
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This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeORGANIZATION |
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30 pts |
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This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeFORMAT |
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20 pts |
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This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeLANGUAGE |
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20 pts |
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Total Points: 100 |
Example of Essay
My Life Reconsidered: A New Worldview
The human experience is filled with struggle, and everyone deals with various challenges and tribulations depending on their upbringing, race, gender, religious beliefs, and age. I have been fortunate as someone who was born Caucasian and male. I am fully aware of my privilege and the opportunities and benefits that have been afforded to me. These are not advantages that I have earned—I was simply born into a race that is not discriminated against as much as minorities and a gender that is sadly seen as superior. In America, both women and minorities have been oppressed throughout the nation’s history. The institution of slavery led to a deeply rooted belief that African Americans were somehow inferior. Even after slavery was abolished, minorities in America continued to suffer across legal, social, and economic lines. Women in America were not given the right to vote until 1920. In addition, gender stereotypes have been reinforced through pop culture, politics, and religious communities. Another critical issue in America that has led to a major disparity in both access to power and access to wealth is the issue of the country’s educational system. The recent shocking and tragic video of George Floyd’s murder by a police officer was a wake-up call for many Americans (and for me as well). By looking at three separate essays on education, racial injustice, and parenting (and three separate personal experiences tied to them), I have begun to better understand how disadvantaged people in America have battled various forms of adversity.
2Education in America has gone through numerous transformations. Early on in the nation’s founding, a well-rounded education was important in order to fully understand history, religion, literature, mathematics, politics, and philosophy. The transcendentalists of the nineteenth century placed a great deal of value on educational pursuits. Intellectual thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau advocated for a reconnection with the natural world as a way to obtain the truest forms of knowledge. Frederick Turner, in his essay “Still Ahead of His Time,” points out that Emerson, “argued that we need fear neither scientific progress nor the grand claims of religion.” In fact, Emerson believed that nature embodied a “divine intelligence” that allowed people to fully understand and process universal truths. Sadly, contemporary American society is a far cry from the idealistic intellectualism that Emerson supported. To put it bluntly, the current state of education in America is abysmal. Whether it is a lackluster curriculum, outrageous tuition costs, or underfunded and under-resourced school systems, Americans are not receiving the education they did in generations past. The value of quality education cannot be understated. Teachers have the power to inspire and ignite their students by helping them tap into their truest passions. In his personal essay “I Just Wanna be Average,” Mike Rose, the educational scholar, reflects on his educational experience in high school and college. After being accidentally relegated to the vocational track because of a name mix-up, Rose was thrust into an eye-opening world of poorly equipped teachers and doomed students. As Rose points out in his essay, “Mostly the teachers had no idea of how to engage the imaginations of us kids who were scuttling along at the bottom of the pond” (2). This is precisely what young minds need: to be inspired by those who they trust, whether it comes from teachers, parents, friends, or even celebrities. It is a teacher’s responsibility to both impart information and take a personal interest in their students. This helps
3young people know that they are valued, appreciated, and have something to offer the world. Despite having the odds against him, Rose was fortunate in that he was assigned a single teacher who changed everything for him: Jack MacFarland. A rough and demanding force, MacFarland helped Rose get into college and ultimately steered him back on track.Reading this essay reminded me of a personal encounter I had with an inspiring educator. In my junior year in high school, I was pretty unhappy. I was struggling academically, especially in my algebra class. As a result, I had withdrawn and felt like I was not capable of making decent grades. My confidence sank extremely low, and I felt that I might not even graduate high school. On the first day of my junior year, I walked into my English class expecting yet another miserable experience where I was constantly discouraged. I did enjoy writing, but I assumed that my creative work did not have a place in high school curriculum. My teacher, Mrs. Louis, completely changed my perspective. She was short, middle-aged, and had striking platinum white hair. Her demeanor was fiery, loud, and passionate. I remember that first day vividly: I walked into her classroom, noting that there were posters of Edgar Allan Poe and Shakespeare on the walls, and I took a seat in the back row. I was tired because it was the end of a long day, so I was going to put my head down and nap. But as soon as Mrs. Louis opened her mouth, my ears perked up and she had my full attention. She said she was throwing out the course textbook and instead wanted us to read the novel Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. Most of the class was upset, but I was thrilled because I love westerns (even though the book is over 800 pages long). I was the only student who read the entire novel, and I became one of Mrs. Louis’s favorite pupils. She was impressed with my writing, and she gave me the confidence I truly needed at that time in my life. She used to call on me all the time by saying, “Let’s hear from Cooper—he always has good things to
4say.” It is my belief that if young people are inspired early on in their academic careers, they might be better equipped to avoid some of the pitfalls that lead to dangerous habits such as substance abuse, crime, and dropping out of school. As Rose succinctly puts it, “It enabled me to do things in the world” (7). Mrs. Louis was also instrumental because she opened my eyes to racial injustice in America. I had never really thought about my privileged upbringing, and it was sickening to realize how unfair so many Americans are treated. This truth became painfully evident in the summer of 2020 when the video of George Floyd’s murder went viral.On June 1, 2020, the online world was stunned and then outraged when the video of an African American man’s murder at the hands of police went viral. The man, George Floyd, was suffocated to death underneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer by the name of Derek Chauvin. I remember seeing links to the video in my Facebook feed, but I was reluctant to watch it because I knew how upsetting it would be. After a couple of days, I felt that I had an obligation to bear witness to the injustice that had occurred. I will never forget the experience of watching that horrifying video on YouTube. My hand was covering my mouth in disbelief as Floyd cried out “I can’t breathe,” and the police officer did not budge. The look on Chauvin’s face, one of smug satisfaction as he took the life of another human being, is seared into my brain. The protests (and sometimes riots) that took place in major cities all over the country following the incident were long overdue and completely understandable. Racial injustice in America has long and deep roots that are still firmly planted in the social soil of the nation. Minorities are frequently targeted and profiled by police, and then they are subsequently treated with hostility and unfairness.In Anthony Sutton’s essay “American Jail,” the graduate student and adjunct college instructor was pulled over for failing to make a complete stop at a stop sign. What followed was
5an illegal search of his backpack, which provided police with a charge: a bottle of Adderall that had not been prescribed to Sutton. As a result, he was arrested and the incident momentarily upended his life. In his essay, Sutton breaks down how police can go about escalating a routine stop by searching someone’s belongings. As Sutton states, “The actual, minor offense (often a traffic violation) is the launching point in which a search is implemented based on the chance that some type of drug can be found” (2-3). This process went down exactly as Sutton outlined in the George Floyd incident. All too often, minorities are targeted simply because of the color of their skin. On a personal level, I lived an admittedly sheltered life. On the one occasion I was pulled over for speeding, I was not overcome with the fear that the officer might arrest, or worse, shoot me. At the time, I was simply annoyed that I received a ticket and would have to pay a fine. But too many minorities fear much more than fines when they see the blinking lights in their rearview mirror.Sutton’s essay, which outlines his entire experience in jail, reminded me of another famous essay written from behind bars: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The letter, written before America had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, documented the injustices that African Americans had faced for far too long. King had been imprisoned for protesting racial injustice in Birmingham in a non-violent demonstration of civil unrest. In his letter, King states, “An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law” (3). This sentiment applies directly to Sutton’s situation in which the young man is arguably pulled over for no other reason than the color of his skin. His subsequent search and arrest are equally unjust. It is perplexing that America has been incapable of shedding its racist past and still engages in discriminatory practices that often result in the death of innocent minorities. As Sutton points out in his essay, “It’s suddenly clear to me that at each juncture there are options, even if just a
6simple way and a hard way, the system keeps choosing which path to follow each time.” The system that Sutton is referring to is designed solely to benefit the ruling class and keep minorities oppressed and disenfranchised. Sutton’s essay hits a personal note for me because one of my high school friends was the subject of a racist encounter with authorities. My senior year in high school, I was at a party with a couple of friends. One of them was African American and played on our football team. I’ll refer to him as Mike for the purpose of this story. Because Mike is muscular and tall, some people are intimidated by the sight of him, but the truth is that he is one of the friendliest and most compassionate people I know. Around 11:15 p.m., the party was broken up by police because the music was too loud and there was some underage drinking happening. I had driven in a separate car from Mike, but we had plans to reconvene after the party at a local diner. When the police arrived, I headed for my car. An officer stopped me and said, “you better go home right now.” I got into my car and drove to the diner where I waited for my friend to show up. It took Mike over half an hour to show up at the diner, at which point he informed me that he had been detained and questioned by the police at the party. Whereas I simply received a verbal warning, Mike was interrogated for over 25 minutes. I can only assume that he was treated more aggressively than I was simply because of the color of his skin. Although I was aware that racial profiling was a reality, this was the first moment that I had evidence based on a real-life experience. It was deeply upsetting and disheartening to know first-hand that racism is truly alive and thriving in America today.Another form of oppression that cannot be denied in America is in regard to how women are treated. Again, I am fully aware of my privilege as a white male who has not had to deal with both race and gender-based discrimination. In her essay “Early Motherhood Has Always Been
7Miserable,” Jessica Grose sheds light on the misconceptions that have surrounded motherhood in America for hundreds of years. In her essay, Grose observes, “Some version of the pristine influencer mother has been pushed on American women since the 1800s — and it’s always been a lie.” Grose goes on to differentiate between the image of influencer mothers as compared to the reality of the experience (one filled with exhaustion, stress, and sometimes even deep depression). Reading her account of motherhood felt a bit like visiting a foreign world. As a young, male college student, parenthood is nowhere on my radar. That said, I know all-too-well the struggles that women, especially young mothers, face. My aunt was a new mother when her husband abandoned her for another woman. She was left to raise their newborn son entirely on her own, all while working a full-time job. The struggles that she endured were painful to witness. She was constantly seeking the help of my parents who were more financially stable. But not until reading Grose’s account did I fully understand how social media can reinforce unreasonable expectations of motherhood. As Grose makes clear in her essay, my aunt was expected to adhere to a certain concept of both what motherhood and femininity should be. Grose breaks down how women have been force-fed throughout American history the right way to behave and exist in the world. It is a sad commentary that contemporary society is so obsessed with ideal versions of people that we fail to see human beings for being beautiful because of their flaws (not in spite of them).There is no doubt about it: I grew up living a truly sheltered life. I was born into a middle class family as both male and Caucasian. While I was unaware of my privilege growing up, it is no longer an excuse to say that I simply do not know the struggles that other people are made to endure. I have experienced concrete evidence that both racism and sexism are troubling issues that still exist in America today. Battling such backwards thinking and primitive mentalities
8starts with the nation’s educational system. We need to reinvest in education and examine why we have become a society that views intellectualism in a negative light. I firmly believe that knowledge is power and that we cannot progress as a species if we continue to deny the true nature of reality. By reading and identifying on some level with the writings of Rose, Sutton, Grose, And Dr. King, and by sitting through the gut-wrenching YouTube video of George Floyd’s murder, I have come to better understand my privileged position in American society. I know that I can help to make a difference in battling racism, oppression, and misogyny. My only hope is that, through properly educating my future children and ensuring they are receiving truth in the classroom, the next generation will better understand how to treat one another with respect, dignity, and compassion.
Works Cited
Grose, Jessica. “Early Motherhood Has Always Been Miserable.”
The New York Times, The New York Times, 9 Nov. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/11/09/opinion/sunday/babies-mothers-anxiety.html. Accessed 26 November 2020.“How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody | Visual Investigations.” YouTube, uploaded by The New York Times, 1 June 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vksEJR9EPQ8&t=2s&bpctr=1606234385King, Martin Luther. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963) [Abridged], University of Texas, 16 Apr. 1963, liberalarts.utexas.edu/coretexts/_files/resources/texts/1963_MLK_Letter_Abridged.pdf. Accessed 29 November 2020.Rose, Mike. “I Just Wanna Be Average'. Free Press, 1989, userwww.sfsu.edu/mmartin/rose.pdf. Accessed 25 November 2020.Sutton, Anthony. “American Jail.” HCC, Sept. 2020, https://eagleonline.hccs.edu/courses/134958/files/21423446?module_item_id=6828028. Accessed 26 November 2020.Turner, Frederick. “Still Ahead of His Time.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 1 May 2003, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/still-ahead-of-his-time-82186396/.
Books treated in class
“I Just Wanna Be Average” MIKE ROSE
Mike Rose is anything but average: he has published poetry, scholarly research, a textbook, and two widely praised books on education in America. A professor in the School of Education at UCLA, Rose has won awards from the National Academy of Education, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Below you'll read the story of how this highly successful teacher and writer started high school in the "vocational education" track, learning dead-end skills from teachers who were often underprepared or incompetent. Rose shows that students whom the system has written off can have tremendous unrealized potential, and his critique of the school system specifies several reasons for the 'failure" of students who go through high school belligerent, fearful, stoned, frustrated, or just plain bored. This selection comes from Lives on the Boundary (1989), Rose's exploration of America's educationally underprivileged. His most recent book, Possible Lives (1996), offers a nationwide tour of creative classrooms and innovative educational programs. Rose is currently researching a new book on the thinking patterns of blue-collar workers. It took two buses to get to Our Lady of Mercy. The first started deep in South Los Angeles and caught me at midpoint. The second drifted through neighborhoods with trees, parks, big lawns, and lots of flowers. The rides were long but were livened up by a group of South L.A. veterans whose parents also thought that Hope had set up shop in the west end of the county. There was Christy Biggars, who, at sixteen, was dealing and was, according to rumor, a pimp as well. There were Bill Cobb and Johnny Gonzales, grease-pencil artists extraordinaire, who left Nembutal-enhanced swirls of "Cobb" and "Johnny" on the corrugated walls of the bus. And then there was Tyrrell Wilson. Tyrrell was the coolest kid I knew. He ran the dozens1 like a metric halfback, laid down a rap that outrhymed and outpointed Cobb, whose rap was good but not great-the curse of a moderately soulful kid trapped in white skin. But it was Cobb who would sneak a radio onto the bus, and thus underwrote his patter with Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, the Coasters, and Ernie K. Doe's mother-in-law, an awful woman who was "sent from down below." And so it was that Christy and Cobb and Johnny G. and Tyrrell and I and assorted others picked up along the way passed our days in the back of the bus, a funny mix brought together by geography and parental desire. Entrance to school brings with it forms and releases and assessments. Mercy relied on a series of tests...for placement, and somehow the results of my tests got confused with those of another student named Rose. The other Rose apparently didn't do very well, for I was placed in the vocational track, a euphemism for the bottom level. Neither I nor my parents realized what this meant. We had no sense that Business Math, Typing, and English-Level D were dead ends. The current spate of reports on the schools criticizes parents for not involving themselves in the education of their children. But how would someone like Tommy Rose, with his two years of Italian schooling, know what to ask? And what sort of pressure could an exhausted waitress apply? The error went undetected, and I remained in the vocational track for two years. What a place. My homeroom was supervised by Brother Dill, a troubled and unstable man who also taught freshman English. When his class drifted away from him, which was often, his voice would rise in paranoid accusations, and occasionally he would lose control and shake or smack us. I hadn't been there two months when one of his brisk, face-turning slaps had my glasses sliding down the aisle. Physical education was also pretty harsh. Our teacher was a stubby ex-lineman who had played old-time pro ball in the Midwest. He routinely had us grabbing our ankles to receive his stinging paddle across our butts. He did that, he said, to make men of us. "Rose," he bellowed on our first encounter; me standing geeky in line in my baggy shorts. "'Rose' ? What the hell kind of name is that?" "Italian, sir," I squeaked. "Italian! Ho. Rose, do you know the sound a bag of shit makes when it hits the wall?" 1 A verbal game of African origin in which competitors try to top each other’s insults.
Rose 2 "No, sir." "Wop!”Sophomore English was taught by Mr. Mitropetros. He was a large, bejeweled man who managed the parking lot at the Shrine Auditorium. He would crow and preen and list for us the stars he'd brushed against. We'd ask questions and glance knowingly and snicker, and all that fueled the poor guy to brag some more. Parking cars was his night job. He had little training in English, so his lesson plan for his day work had us reading the district's required text, Julius Caesar, aloud for the semester. We'd finished the play way before the twenty weeks was up, so he'd have us switch parts again and again and start again: Dave Snyder, the fastest guy at Mercy, muscling through Caesar to the breathless squeals of Calpurnia, as interpreted by Steve Fusco, a surfer who owned the school's most envied paneled wagon. Week ten and Dave and Steve would take on new roles, as would we all, and render a water-logged Cassius and a Brutus that are beyond my powers of description. Spanish I - taken in the second year - fell into the hands of a new recruit. Mr. Montez was a tiny man, slight, five foot six at the most, soft-spoken and delicate. Spanish was a particularly rowdy class, and Mr. Montez was as prepared for it as a doily maker at a hammer throw. He would tap his pencil to a room in which Steve Fusco was propelling spitballs from his heavy lips, in which Mike Dweetz was taunting Billy Hawk, a half-Indian, half-Spanish, reed-thin, quietly explosive boy. The vocational track at Our Lady of Mercy mixed kids traveling in from South L.A. with South Bay surfers and a few Slavs and Chicanos from the harbors of San Pedro. This was a dangerous miscellany: surfers and hodads and South-Central blacks all ablaze to the metronomic tapping of Hector Montez's pencil. One day Billy lost it. Out of the comer of my eye I saw him strike out with his right arm and catch Dweetz across the neck. Quick as a spasm, Dweetz was out of his seat, scattering desks, cracking Billy on the side of the head, right behind the eye. Snyder and Fusco and others broke it up, but the room felt hot and close and naked. Mr. Montez's tenuous authority was finally ripped to shreds, and I think everyone felt a little strange about that. The charade was over, and when it came down to it, I don't think any of the kids really wanted it to end this way. They had pushed and pushed and bullied their way into a freedom that both scared and embarrassed them. Students will float to the mark you set. I and the others in the vocational classes were bobbing in pretty shallow water. Vocational education has aimed at increasing the economic opportunities of students who do not do well in our schools. Some serious programs succeed in doing that, and through exceptional teachers...students learn to develop hypotheses and troubleshoot, reason through a problem, and communicate effectively - the true job skills. The vocational track, however, is most often a place for those who are just not making it, a dumping ground for the disaffected. There were a few teachers who worked hard at education; young Brother Slattery, for example, combined a stern voice with weekly quizzes to try to pass along to us a skeletal outline of world history. But mostly the teachers had no idea of how to engage the imaginations of us kids who were scuttling along at the bottom of the pond. And the teachers would have needed some inventiveness, for none of us was groomed for the classroom. It wasn't just that I didn't know things - didn't know how to simplify algebraic fractions, couldn't identify different kinds of clauses, bungled Spanish translations - but that I had developed various faulty and inadequate ways of doing algebra and making sense of Spanish. Worse yet, the years of defensive tuning out in elementary school had given me a way to escape quickly while seeming at least half alert. During my time in Voc. Ed., I developed further into a mediocre student and a somnambulant problem solver, and that affected the subjects I did have the wherewithal to handle: I detested Shakespeare; I got bored with history. My attention flitted here and there. I fooled around in class and read my books indifferently - the intellectual equivalent of playing with your food. I did what I had to do to get by, and I did it with half a mind. But I did learn things about people and eventually came into my own socially. I liked the guys in Voc. Ed. Growing up where I did, I understood and admired physical prowess, and there was an abundance of muscle here. There was Dave Snyder, a sprinter and halfback of true quality. Dave's ability and his quick wit gave him a natural appeal, and he was welcome in any clique, though he always kept a little independent. He enjoyed acting the fool and could care less about studies, but he possessed a certain maturity and never caused the faculty much trouble. It was a testament to his inde-pendence that he included me among his friends - I eventually went out for track, but I was no jock. Owing to the Latin alphabet and a dearth of Rs and Ss, Snyder sat behind Rose, and we started
Rose 3 exchanging one-liners and became friends. There was Ted Richard, a much-touted Little League pitcher. He was chunky and had a baby face and came to Our Lady of Mercy as a seasoned street fighter. Ted was quick to laugh and he had a loud, jolly laugh, but when he got angry he'd smile a little smile, the kind that simply raises the comer of the mouth a quarter of an inch. For those who knew, it was an eerie signal. Those who didn't found themselves in big trouble, for Ted was very quick. He loved to carry on what we would come to call philosophical discussions: What is courage? Does God exist? He also loved words, enjoyed picking up big ones like salubrious and equivocal and using them in our conversations -laughing at himself as the word hit a chuckhole rolling off his tongue. Ted didn't do all that well in school- baseball and parties and testing the courage he'd speculated about took up his time. His textbooks were Argosy and Field and Stream, whatever newspapers he'd find on the bus stop - from the Daily Worker to pornography - conversations with uncles or hobos or businessmen he'd meet in a coffee shop, The Old Man and the Sea. With hindsight, I can see that Ted was developing into one of those rough-hewn intellectuals whose sources are a mix of the learned and the apocryphal, whose discussions are both assured and sad. And then there was Ken Harvey. Ken was good-looking in a puffy way and had a full and oily ducktail and was a car enthusiast. . . a hodad. One day in religion class, he said the sentence that turned out to be one of the most memorable of the hundreds of thousands I heard in those Voc. Ed. years. We were talking about the parable of the talents, about achievement, working hard, doing the best you can do, blah-blah-blah, when the teacher called on the restive Ken Harvey for an opinion. Ken thought about it, but just for a second, and said (with studied, minimal affect), "I just wanna be average." That woke me up. Average? Who wants to be average? Then the athletes chimed in with the cliches that make you want to laryngectomize them, and the exchange became a platitudinous melee. At the time, I thought Ken's assertion was stupid, and I wrote him off. But his sentence has stayed with me all these years, and I think I am finally coming to understand it. Ken Harvey was gasping for air. School can be a tremendously disorienting place. No matter how bad the school, you're going to encounter notions that don't fit with the assumptions and beliefs that you grew up with - maybe you'll hear these dissonant notions from teachers, maybe from the other students, and maybe you'll read them. You'll also be thrown in with all kinds of kids from all kinds of backgrounds, and that can be unsettling - this is especially true in places of rich ethnic and linguistic mix, like the L.A. basin. You'll see a handful of students far excel you in courses that sound exotic and that are only in the curriculum of the elite: French, physics, trigonometry. And all this is happening while you're trying to shape an identity, your body is changing, and your emotions are running wild. If you're a working-class kid in the vocational track, the options you'll have to deal with this will be constrained in certain ways: you're defined by your school as "slow"; you're placed in a curriculum that isn't designed to liberate you but to occupy you, or, if you're lucky, train you, though the training is for work the society does not esteem; other students are picking up the cues from your school and your curriculum and interacting with you in particular ways. If you're a kid like Ted Richard, you turn your back on all this and let your mind roam where it may. But youngsters like Ted are rare. What Ken and so many others do is protect themselves from such suffocating madness by taking on with a vengeance the identity implied in the vocational track. Reject the confusion and frustration by openly defining yourself as the Common Joe. Champion the average. Rely on your own good sense. Fuck this bullshit. Bullshit, of course, is everything you - and the others - fear is beyond you: books, essays, tests, academic scrambling, complexity, scien-tific reasoning, philosophical inquiry. The tragedy is that you have to twist the knife in your own gray matter to make this defense work. You'll have to shut down, have to reject intellectual stimuli or diffuse them with sarcasm, have to cultivate stupidity, have to convert boredom from a malady into a way of confronting the world. Keep your vocabulary simple, act stoned when you're not or act more stoned than you are, flaunt ignorance, materialize your dreams. It is a powerful and effective defense - it neutralizes the insult and the frustration of being a vocational kid and, when perfected, it drives teachers up the wall, a delightful secondary effect. But like all strong magic, it exacts a price. My own deliverance from the Voc. Ed. world began with sophomore biology. Every student, college prep to vocational, had to take biology, and unlike the other courses, the same person taught all sections. When teaching the vocational group, Brother Clint probably slowed down a bit or omitted a little of the fundamental biochemistry, but he used the same book and more or less the same syllabus across the
Rose 4 board. If one class got tough, he could get tougher. He was young and powerful and very handsome, and looks and physical strength were high currency. No one gave him any trouble. I was pretty bad at the dissecting table, but the lectures and the textbook were interesting: plastic overlays that, with each turned page, peeled away skin, then veins and muscle, then organs, down to the very bones that Brother Clint, pointer in hand, would tap out on our hanging skeleton. Dave Snyder was in big trouble, for the study of life - versus the living of it-was sticking in his craw. We worked out a code for our multiple-choice exams. He'd poke me in the back: once for the answer under A, twice for B, and so on; and when he'd hit the right one, I'd look up to the ceiling as though I were lost in thought. Poke: cytoplasm. Poke, poke: methane. Poke, poke, poke: William Harvey. Poke, poke, poke, poke: islets of Langerhans. This didn't work out perfectly, but Dave passed the course, and I mastered the dreamy look of a guy on a record jacket. And something else happened. Brother Clint puzzled over this Voc. Ed. kid who was racking up 98s and 99s on his tests. He checked the school's records and discovered the error. He recommended that I begin my junior year in the College Prep program. According to all I've read since, such a shift, as one report put it, is virtually impossible. Kids at that level rarely cross tracks. The telling thing is how chancy both my placement into and exit from Voc. Ed. was; neither I nor my parents had anything to do with it. I lived in one world during spring semester, and when I came back to school in the fall, I was living in another. Switching to College Prep was a mixed blessing. I was an erratic student. I was undisciplined. And I hadn't caught onto the rules of the game: why work hard in a class that didn't grab my fancy? I was also hopelessly behind in math. Chemistry was hard; toying with my chemistry set years before hadn't prepared me for the chemist's equations. Fortunately, the priest who taught both chemistry and second-year algebra was also the school's athletic director. Membership on the track team covered me; I knew I wouldn't get lower than a C. U.S. history was taught pretty well, and I did okay. But civics was taken over by a football coach who had trouble reading the textbook aloud - and reading aloud was the centerpiece of his pedagogy. College Prep at Mercy was certainly an improvement over the vocational program - at least it carried some status - but the social science curriculum was weak, and the mathematics and physical sciences were simply beyond me. I had a miserable quantitative background and ended up copying some assignments and finessing the rest as best I could. Let me try to explain how it feels to see again and again material you should once have learned but didn't. You are given a problem. It requires you to simplify algebraic fractions or to multiply expressions containing square roots. You know this is pretty basic material because you've seen it for years. Once a teacher took some time with you, and you learned how to carry out these operations. Simple versions, anyway. But that was a year or two or more in the past, and these are more complex versions, and now you're not sure. And this, you keep telling yourself, is ninth- or even eighth-grade stuff. Next it's a word problem. This is also old hat. The basic elements are as familiar as story characters: trains speeding so many miles per hour or shadows of buildings angling so many degrees. Maybe you know enough, have sat through enough explanations, to be able to begin setting up the problem: "If one train is going this fast. . ." or "This shadow is really one line of a triangle..." Then: "Let's see..." "How did Jones do this?" "Hmmmm." "No." "No, that won't work." Your attention wavers. You wonder about other things: a football game, a dance, that cute new checker at the market. You try to focus on the problem again. You scribble on paper for a while, but the tension wins out and your attention flits elsewhere. You crumple the paper and begin daydreaming to ease the frustration. The particulars will vary, but in essence this is what a number of students go through, especially those in so-called remedial classes. They open their textbooks and see once again the familiar and impenetrable formulas and diagrams and terms that have stumped them for years. There is no excitement here. No excitement. Regardless of what the teacher says, this is not a new challenge. There is, rather, embarrassment and frustration and, not surprisingly, some anger in being reminded once again of long-standing inadequacies. No wonder so many students finally attribute their difficulties to something inborn, organic: 'That part of my brain just doesn't work." Given the troubling histories many of these students have, it's miraculous that any of them can lift the shroud of hopelessness sufficiently to make de-liverance from these classes possible. Through this entire period, my father's health was deteriorating with cruel momentum. His arteriosclerosis progressed to the point where a simple nick on his shin wouldn't heal. Eventually it ulcerated and widened. Lou Minton would come by daily to change the dressing. We tried renting an
Rose 5 oscillating bed - which we placed in the front room - to force blood through the constricted arteries in my father's legs. The bed hummed through the night, moving in place to ward off the inevitable. The ulcer continued to spread, and the doctors finally had to amputate. My grandfather had lost his leg in a stockyard accident. Now my father too was crippled. His convalescence was slow but steady, and the doctors placed him in the Santa Monica Rehabilitation Center, a sun-bleached building that opened out onto the warm spray of the Pacific. The place gave him some strength and some color and some training in walking with an artificial leg. He did pretty well for a year or so until he slipped and broke his hip. He was confined to a wheelchair after that, and the confinement contributed to the diminishing of his body and spirit. I am holding a picture of him. He is sitting in his wheelchair and smiling at the camera. The smile appears forced, unsteady, seems to quaver, though it is frozen in silver nitrate. He is in his mid-sixties and looks eighty. Late in my junior year, he had a stroke and never came out of the resulting coma. After that, I would see him only in dreams, and to this day that is how I join him. Sometimes the dreams are sad and grisly and primal: my father lying in a bed soaked with his suppuration, holding me, rocking me. But sometimes the dreams bring him back to me healthy: him talking to me on an empty street, or buying some pictures to decorate our old house, or transformed somehow into someone strong and adept with tools and the physical. Jack MacFarland couldn't have come into my life at a better time. My father was dead, and I had logged up too many years of scholastic indifference. Mr. MacFarland had a master's degree from Columbia and decided, at twenty-six, to find a little school and teach his heart out. He never took any credentialing courses, couldn't bear to, he said, so he had to find employment in a private system. He ended up at Our Lady of Mercy teaching five sections of senior English. He was a beatnik who was born too late. His teeth were stained, he tucked his sorry tie in between the third and fourth buttons of his shirt, and his pants were chronically wrinkled. At first, we couldn't believe this guy, thought he slept in his car. But within no time, he had us so startled with work that we didn't much worry about where he slept or if he slept at all. We wrote three or four essays a month. We read a book every two to three weeks, starting with the Iliad and ending up with Hemingway. He gave us a quiz on the reading every other day. He brought a prep school curriculum to Mercy High. MacFarland's lectures were crafted, and as he delivered them he would pace the room jiggling a piece of chalk in his cupped hand, using it to scribble on the board the names of all the writers and philosophers and plays and novels he was weaving into his discussion. He asked questions often, raised everything from Zeno's paradox to the repeated last line of Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." He slowly and carefully built up our knowledge of Western intellectual history-with facts, with connections, with speculations. We learned about Greek philosophy, about Dante, the Elizabethan world view, the Age of Reason, existentialism. He analyzed poems with us, had us reading sections from John Ciardi's How Does a Poem Mean?, making a potentially difficult book accessible with his own explanations. We gave oral reports on poems Ciardi didn't cover. We imitated the styles of Conrad, Hemingway, and Time magazine. We wrote and talked, wrote and talked. The man immersed us in language. Even MacFarland's barbs were literary. If Jim Fitzsimmons, hung over and irritable, tried to smart-ass him, he'd rejoin with a flourish that would spark the indomitable Skip Madison - who'd lost his front teeth in a hapless tackle - to flick his tongue through the gap and opine, "good chop," drawing out the single "0" in stinging indictment. Jack MacFarland, this tobacco-stained intellectual, brandished linguistic weapons of a kind I hadn't encountered before. Here was this egghead, for God's sake, keeping some pretty difficult people in line. And from what I heard, Mike Dweetz and Steve Fusco and all the notorious Voc. Ed. crowd settled down as well when MacFarland took the podium. Though a lot of guys groused in the schoolyard, it just seemed that giving trouble to this particular teacher was a silly thing to do. Tomfoolery, not to mention assault, had no place in the world he was trying to create for us, and instinctively everyone knew that. If nothing else, we all recognized MacFarland's considerable intelligence and respected the hours he put into his work. It came to this: the troublemaker would look foolish rather than daring. Even Jim Fitzsimmons was reading On the Road and turning his incipient alcoholism to literary ends. There were some lives that were already beyond Jack MacFarland's ministrations, but mine was not. I started reading again as I hadn't since elementary school. I would go into our gloomy little
Rose 6 bedroom or sit at the dinner table while, on the television, Danny McShane was paralyzing Mr. Mota with the atomic drop, and work slowly back through Heart of Darkness, trying to catch the words in Conrad's sentences. I certainly was not MacFarland's best student; most of the other guys in College Prep, even my fellow slackers, had better backgrounds than I did. But I worked very hard, for MacFarland had hooked me. He tapped myoId interest in reading and creating stories. He gave me a way to feel special by using my mind. And he provided a role model that wasn't shaped on physical prowess alone, and something inside me that I wasn't quite aware of responded to that. Jack MacFarland established a literacy club, to borrow a phrase of Frank Smith's, and invited me - invited all of us - to join. There's been a good deal of research and speculation suggesting that the acknowledgment of school performance with extrinsic rewards - smiling faces, stars, numbers, grades - diminishes the intrinsic satisfaction children experience by engaging in reading or writing or problem solving. While it's certainly true that we've created an educational system that encourages our best and brightest to become cynical grade collectors and, in general, have developed an obsession with evaluation and assessment, I must tell you that venal though it may have been, I loved getting good grades from MacFarland. I now know how subjective grades can be, but then they came tucked in the back of essays like bits of scientific data, some sort of spectroscopic readout that said, objectively and publicly, that I had made something of value. I suppose I'd been mediocre for too long and enjoyed a public redefinition. And I suppose the workings of my mind, such as they were, had been private for too long. My linguistic play moved into the world; . . . these papers with their circled, red B-pluses and A-minuses linked my mind to something outside it. I carried them around like a club emblem. One day in the December of my senior year, Mr. MacFarland asked me where I was going to go to college. I hadn't thought much about it. Many of the students I teach today spent their last year in high school with a physics text in one hand and the Stanford catalog in the other, but I wasn't even aware of what "entrance requirements" were. My folks would say that they wanted me to go to college and be a doctor, but I don't know how seriously I ever took that; it seemed a sweet thing to say, a bit of supportive family chatter, like telling a gangly daughter she's graceful. The reality of higher education wasn't in my scheme of things: no one in the family had gone to college; only two of my uncles had completed high school. I figured I'd get a night job and go to the local junior college because I knew that Snyder and Company were going there to play ball. But I hadn't even prepared for that. When I finally said, "I don't know," MacFarland looked down at me - I was seated in his office - and said, "Listen, you can write." My grades stank. I had A's in biology and a handful of B's in a few English and social science classes. All the rest were C's - or worse. MacFarland said I would do well in his class and laid down the law about doing well in the others. Still, the record for my first three years wouldn't have been acceptable to any four-year school. To nobody's surprise, I was turned down flat by USC and UCLA. But Jack MacFarland was on the case. He had received his bachelor's degree from Loyola University, so he made calls to old professors and talked to somebody in admissions and wrote me a strong letter. Loyola finally accepted me as a probationary student. I would be on trial for the first year, and if I did okay, I would be granted regular status. MacFarland also intervened to get me a loan, for I could never have afforded a private college without it. Four more years of religion classes and four more years of boys at one school, girls at another. But at least I was going to college. Amazing. In my last semester of high school, I elected a special English course fashioned by Mr. MacFarland, and it was through this elective that there arose at Mercy a fledgling literati. Art Mitz, the editor of the school newspaper and a very smart guy, was the kingpin. He was joined by me and by Mark Dever, a quiet boy who wrote beautifully and who would die before he was forty. MacFarland occasionally invited us to his apartment, and those visits became the high point of our apprenticeship: we'd clamp on our training wheels and drive to his salon. He lived in a cramped and cluttered place near the airport, tucked away in the kind of building that architectural critic Reyner Banham calls a dingbat. Books were allover: stacked, piled, tossed, and crated, underlined and dog eared, well worn and new. Cigarette ashes crusted with coffee in saucers or spilling over the sides of motel ashtrays. The little bedroom had, along two of its walls, bricks and boards loaded with notes, magazines, and oversized books. The kitchen joined the living room, and there was a stack of German newspapers under the sink. I had never seen anything like it: a great flophouse of language
Rose 7 furnished by City Lights and Cafe Ie Metro. I read every title. I flipped through paperbacks and scanned jackets and memorized names: Gogol, Finnegans Wake, Djuna Barnes, Jackson Pollock, A Coney Island of the Mind, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance, all sorts of Freud, Troubled Sleep, Man Ray, The Education of Henry Adams, Richard Wright, Film as Art, William Butler Yeats, Marguerite Duras, Red-burn, A Season in Hell, Kapital. On the cover of Alain-Fournier's The Wanderer was an Edward Gorey drawing of a young man on a road winding into dark trees. By the hotplate sat a strange Kafka novel called Amerika, in which an adolescent hero crosses the Atlantic to find the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Art and Mark would be talking about a movie or the school newspaper, and I would be consuming my English teacher's library. It was heady stuff. I felt like a Pop Warner athlete on steroids. Art, Mark, and I would buy stogies and triangulate from MacFarland's apartment to the Cinema, which now shows X-rated films but was then L.A.'s premier art theater, and then to the musty Cherokee Bookstore in Hollywood to hobnob with beatnik homosexuals - smoking, drinking bourbon and coffee, and trying out awkward phrases we'd gleaned from our mentor's bookshelves. I was happy and precocious and a little scared as well, for Hollywood Boulevard was thick with a kind of decadence that was foreign to the South Side. After the Cherokee, we would head back to the security of MacFarland's apartment, slaphappy with hipness. Let me be the first to admit that there was a good deal of adolescent passion in this embrace of the avant-garde: self-absorption, sexually charged pedantry, an elevation of the odd and abandoned. Still it was a time during which I absorbed an awful lot of information: long lists of titles, images from expressionist paintings, new wave shibboleths, snippets of philosophy, and names that read like Steve Fusco's misspellings - Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. Now this is hardly the stuff of deep understanding. But it was an introduction, a phrase book, a [travel guide] to a vocabulary of ideas, and it felt good at the time to know all these words. With hindsight I realize how layered and important that knowledge was. It enabled me to do things in the world. I could browse bohemian bookstores in far-off, mysterious Hollywood; I could go to the Cinema and see events through the lenses of European directors; and, most of all, Icould share an evening, talk that talk, with Jack MacFarland, the man I most admired at the time. Knowledge was becoming a bonding agent. Within a year or two, the persona of the disaffected hipster would prove too cynical, too alienated to last. But for a time it was new and exciting: it provided a critical perspective on society, and it allowed me to act as though I were living beyond the limiting boundaries of South Vermont.
2
“American Jail” by Anthony Sutton
In February of my year as an adjunct professor, Officer Salazar pullsme over on the intersection of Greenbush and 14th Street in the small college town I live in for not coming to a complete stop. Officer Salazar tells me something I know to be true: my plates are expired (I can be negligent). He tells me something Iknow notto be true: that it’s routine for police to search for narcotics at night (I have been pulled over at this intersection before, a tricky one for me even though I used to live right around the corner—it’s a three-way intersection by a school and the trees often obscure the stop sign late at night—I’ve been pulled over at night many times over the four years I’ve lived in this town. I can be very negligent). I won’t know until I receive a copy of the police report, but Officer Salazar describes me as “stuttering and shaking,” and states that he “couldn’t see my left hand.” He makes me put both hands on the steering wheel (which, in retrospect, should resolve any concerns of what may have been holding) and wait until two more police cars come. There are two times prior to this that I have been stopped and interrogated by police in this town, and in my life. The first was when I got lost walking home at night and a police car stopped, two officers ran my ID through their computer, then neglected to help direct me home. The second time, I walked home from a restaurant by my apartment when a police car’s lights started flashing infront of me. Thefirst officer gotout of his car and apologized, saying that he thought I was someone else. He then asked for my ID. At some point another police car had parked behind me discreet
2) enough that I didn’t notice. The first officer got into his car and while we waited, the other officer asked me what I do. “I’m a grad student.” I said. “What do you study?”“Creative Writing. Poetry. Not something that’ll ever make money.”“It’s good that you’re following your dreams. Not a lot of people do that,” the second officer said as police lights flashed through the neighborhood. When recalling this incident to people, I say, “I guess there was a killer hipster on the loose.”When two more officers arrive to join Officer Salazar, I am asked by one to get out of my car and then patted down by each officer. Each are frustrated by the absurd amount of pockets I have (10). When asked about my Texas plates and ID I lie through my teeth and I say I’ve recently moved to town. I play up my connection to the university and my academic life—“Last weekend I was in Louisville for a conference... 20th and 21st century literature and culture”—to which one of the officers says “Sounds boring as shit.”I don’t go further and explain that the paper I presented was on the sub-genre of nonfiction referred to as auto-theory, a blending of autobiography and critical theory, and how this genre is particularly useful to writers of marginalized backgrounds.The officer who said my conference sounded boring pats me down, and another brings out a search dog which the police report will say “did not alert” to my car. I talk to the other two officers as the search dog circles in patrol and has to be pulled back when he starts walking away from the scene. I later learn that this set of tactics is, in legal scholarship, called a pretext arrest. The actual, minor offense (often a traffic violation) is the launching point in which a search is
3) implemented based onthe chance that some type of drug can be found. As someone with no background in legal scholarship, I don’t understand how this isn’t considered void as an escalation.In a moment too fast for me to grasp—Officer Salazar shouts, asking if he can look through my backpack while I’m also talking to another officer and from the corner of my eye I’m watching the search dog roaming around—I agree to let the officers look through my backpack in a quick blurt, “OK.” After I say this, I realize there’s AdderallI bought off a friend to help me teach my 7:30-10:30 AM classes and for the trip to Louisville. Officer Salazar and the second officer head to my car and the third officer pulls the search dog by the collar and then stands by me. The first two officers quickly find the bottle. My attorney will later say that there’s a difference between “can we look through your bag”and “we’re looking through your bag”implying that this encounter is subject to logical response. Though I know it’s pointless, I want to argue that affect is content. Likehow the poet and critic Charles Bernstein argues that, in literature, the form of a text (whether a text is traditional or experimental, the difference between reading a novel and a sonnet) is also a type of content. I want to argue that having “Can we look through your bag” with the inflection of a demand does not qualify as a question. Especially as you see the search dog roaming around and you need the other officer to think you’re giving him your full attention, thoughyou shouldn't.One of the officers yells about how Adderall requires a prescription and Officer Salazar calmly puts handcuffs on me, leads me into the back of his police car, and reads me my Miranda warning. In philosophy of language, there are performative speech acts, when language makes something happen, which the philosopher J.L. Austin outlined in his book that defined the concept, How to do Things with Words. The traditional example is a marriage officiator. When the officiator says “I now pronounce you husband and wife” this phrase is perlocutionary. By saying it, the
4) phrase causes an array effects ranging from the two people now being legally married, to people in the audience crying, to both individuals gaining hospital visitation rights. When the officer gets to the part saying that anything I say can be used as evidence, I don’t feel like it’s my choice to be silent, but rather like my voice has been plucked from my throat.As he clearly tries to lead me into telling him from whom I bought the Adderall, I deflect each question. With no leads, Officer Salazar drives me to the jail. He says he’ll take in where I’ll be served a court-date. It’s almost midnight and I imagine that in a couple hours I’ll be making a 3-mile hike down 9th street from the jail to my apartment.Officer Salazar drives through an entryway in the jail, opens the car door, exposing manila walls and fluorescent lights. He brings me to a room where there are two correctional officers. I’m told to sit in a chair. I’m still handcuffed.A woman, dressed in the brown uniform of a correctional officer, takes out the contents of my backpack, mostly books (mostly poetry and philosophy). She asks me if there’s a number in my phone contacts she should record for me. Partly because my phone is about to die and partly because after this moment I will not be able to access my phone until I am released. The other officer removes my handcuffs and has me move into a closed-off part of the room. First I have to strip down to my underwear, he passes off each article of clothing I remove. Then he asks me to remove my underwear, turn around and cough. I consider telling him that he’s the first man to see me naked in a while.I put my underwear back on and I’m handed a blue jumpsuit and orange sandals. Then, I’m walked to a room where two other men are sitting. There’s an unclosed-off toilet and a payphone. One of the men has his hands clasped over his face. I’m starting to consider the possibility that maybe I won’t be on my way in time to teach my 7:30 AM section. Both men are brought out and
5) I’m waiting alone for what I approximate was forty-five minutes, if only to maintain some perception of time.Once out, a correctional officer records my fingerprints and takes my arrest photos before giving me a quick questionnaire. “Are you depressed?”(A question I now know if I answer yes would entail me being handcuffed again and taken to a hospital—not a bad option). “Do you have dietary concerns?” “I’m vegetarian.”“Is it for a medical need?”“No.”I am told that my bail is $215. I ask if they can put it on my credit card, and they can. It’s the end of the month, so I know I will likely need to transfer money to the card. I try to ask if I can, but the officer cuts me off—“No”—before I can finish my question. I have one free phone call before I enter my cell, but it’s 2:00 am, and I know there’s no one who would answer. What would be more helpful would be for me to email my students. I ask if I can, and the officer says another sharp No.The officer directs me to a pile of plastic mattresses and bin of blankets against the wall and tells me to pick up one of each.“This isn’t how I was told this was going to happen,” I say.“Cops are dumb. Don’t trust cops,” he responds. I pick up the mattress and blanket I’ll be sleeping in. I ask this officer when he’ll run my credit card. “Whenever I get to it.”It’s suddenly clear to me that at each juncture there are options, even if just a simple way and a hard way, the system keeps choosing which path to follow each time. The officer didn’t have
6) to give me more than a warning for missing the stop sign, but did. The officers shouldn’t have looked through my bag after the search dog didn’t react, but did. I didn’t have to be taken to the county jail over a minor offense that took an hour of searching to discover, but was. I feel like a pinball, distantly aware that the machine is being operated. I walk through the cell’s heavy door, lay the mattress on the top bunk, climb into bed. I’m certain that I will be released by day’s end, so instead of sleeping, I clench my jaw and decide to wait.I share the cell with two men. One of them entered minutes before me. He was clearly drunk and dropped his mattress on the floor before falling on top of it. The other is asleep on the bottom bunk.I throw my mattress on the top bunk of the cell and lie flat. Above me is a light fixture on the ceiling that won’t turn off. There is a chrome toilet next to the bunk and above that a surveillance camera. A sink with a steel plate and toothbrushesstand between the toilet and the door to the cell. On the wall opposite the door are two strips of glass with grainy surfaces and a light behind them that I imagine is meant to make it seem like it’s perpetually sunrise. All night I can hear a man in one of the cells screaming.When the cellmate who slept in the bunk under mine woke up, he was quick to flash his genitals at me. “Do you like it?” I shooed him off, “I’m not interested,” “But do you like it?” “I’m not interested.”I’m struck by how quickly he shifts his tone. Now, more like Virgil walking Dante past the Gates of Hell, he was still eager to tell me about himself and the situation we’re in. He self-identified as a dopehead who, for reasons I don’t understand, was brought to the jail for a transitory period where he’d been taken out of the prison and will return in the afternoon, his account, at times, shaky and unreliable to the point that he might as well of claimed to be Virgil.
7) WhenI tell him what I’m in forand what I do, he says “These police do not mess around. They are even arresting professors out here!” He says I’ll be out by the end of the day and asks me to have two screwdrivers and some Adderall for him when I’m out. I feel guilty that, years later, I still haven’t.He asks me more about my life:“You have any women friends?”“Yes.”“Do you know any of their addresses? I’ll write them letters!”“No, I don’t just know their addresses off the top of my head!” I try to play friendly, “I don’t go around memorizing people’s addresses.”Later: “Do you ever just pop eight Adderalls and teach high?” He laughs.“That’s not quite how that works.” It’s true I haven’t, but I’m especially firm knowing there’s a camera over me.As the conversation continues it becomes clear he interpreted my refusing to perform oral sex as me identifying as straight. He asks about my haircut, grown out of what was once an undercut, and tells me its a style he’s only seen worn by bisexual people on The Jerry Springer Show. He tells me that when one lies they’re only really hurting themselves. He says people should be more open and honest, like all the bisexual people on Jerry Springer sporting undercuts.The door opens and a correctional officer brings in three trays containing oatmeal and a powdery imitation-milk concoction. I eat the oatmeal and my cellmate pours both of our milks into the toilets. The third cellmate is still asleep and thus forfeits his breakfast—the correctional officers take it up along with the empty trays.
8) When the third cellmate wakes, he is at first confused to be waking up in a jail cell and says he has a plane to catch tonight.He says he grew up in this town but lives in Tampa now, that he only gets in this kind trouble when he’s back home. He was visiting his brother who just became a father. They went to a bar and after the night got hazy he vaguely remembers walking down Main Street and seeing a police officer.The door opens again and a correctional officer tells us it’s time for “break.”Break is a time when all the inmates are removed from their cells and put in a bigger room together. There are pay phones in this room and some of the men use them, often shouting at whoever is on the other end. I sit by myself inthe front-left corner of the room facing a window to the hallway. I can see correctional officers walk around my reflection like Foucault’s pendulum. I try to make a stern face but look approximately as fey as normal. I don’t make eye contact with anyone in the room. My cellmate from Tampa is sitting with someone else he clearly knows. My cellmate from the bunk below me moves from person to person, often announcing that I’m in for having Adderall. Like him, none of the other inmates realized having Adderall without a prescription was an arrestable offence, though one of the men says he hopes I get a good lawyer. His comment leaves me nervous.There’s a man who keeps shouting at the door, pounding his fist against it, for the correctional officers to give him his glasses. I assume he’s the man who shouted through the night. He has a long, gray beard running over his neck. The officers come to the door for a little and laugh, taunting him from the other side of the window. The man doesn’t let up and after a while they escort him away.
9) Later, two correctional officers come into the room for the cellmate who slept in the bunk beneath me. I assume it’s to bring him back to the prison since this is the last time I see him. A while more passes and the officers bringus back to our cells. The walk to and back from break are the only opportunities I get to see a clock. It is almost noon.It’s impossible to count the hours that pass as we wait to see the magistrate. I’m nervous that I’ll spend another nightin jail. While I’m still confident that I’ll be released after I see the magistrate, I can imagine being told that there just wasn’t enough time for you today. I can imagine not being told anything at all. I sit on my bunk in the cell for a day and not know until breakfast comes in. The door opens and an officer gives us lunch: a gooey Mac & Cheese plate with crumbles of bacon in it and the same powdery milk concoction as breakfast. “I’m not near the end of my patience, but I will be after another day,” I think to myself.It’s not my cellmate from Tampa’s first time in jail and, for this, he becomes a reliable guide. He explains to me what an O.R. is (a release, the verdict I want to receive). After what feels like hours of waiting to see the magistrate (my cellmate from Tampa says it’s our right to know when this meeting will be), he presses the call button but nothing happens (I assume that, like the strips of glass with a light behind them, it’s meant to be an illusion). Later when he holds down the button for a couple minutes he gets a response. All my adult life I’ve been witness to conversations about how jails and prisons are not meant to reform anyone or make society better. Basically corporations, people say. It’s becoming clear to me that thereis an idea of improvement in place. What improvement here really means is being better at working inside the system so that
10) it does not break you. If I would have known how to deflect the police officers who surrounded me like vultures, I wouldn’t be in this state of free fall. I admire my cellmate for getting someone to budge. The voice on the other side tells him they need his inmate ID.“How do I get that?”“Write down your name on a sheet of paper and slide it under the door.”This proves to be a challenging task since there is nothing to write with in our cell. For obvious reasons, there’s nothing sharp. My cellmate finds a bible, a sheet of paper, a tube of toothpaste and begins tearing out words and letters from the bible trying to spell out his request for his prisoner ID. He’s fortunate that he shares his name with Moses’s brother. I’m not sure if I’m more in awe of the ingenuity of creating this request, or the stubbornness it took for him to even get a response from people who clearly have no interest in helping him. When he completes half a sentence, the cell door opens and we’re told to get out. It’s 2:30 pm and we’re meeting the magistrate.Because every step in jail requires a waiting period, we’re brought into a waiting room identical tothe one I was in after changing into my jumpsuit. An inmate asks me why I’m chewing on the end of the swoop of hair that runs over my face. I stop and my cellmate from Tampa tells me to not become “the prison bitch” (I remember this comment in case I needto talk myself into an O.R. It’s a threat to my wellbeing to stay here, maybe? I know there’s not a jail specifically for queer vegetarians, but surely someone has some cencept of identity politics and the psychic burden laid on the marginalized that theycan understand the psychological assault I’m withstanding). As we’re waiting, people ask what I’m in for, what I do. I quickly deliver “I’m a professor” and leave it at that.
11) They direct us all to sit on two benches facing a window exposing the room where the magistrate will preside. Each inmate is handed a sheet of paper stating the terms of the trial: that this hearing is meant for each inmate to confirm that they understand the nature of the charge(s) against them, give each inmate the opportunity to take a public defendant or agree to hire an attorney, and if they argue the charges in the hearing, anything they say can be used as evidence in a later court date. In the case of an O.R., the suspect must maintain “good and lawful behavior” and “not use or possess alcohol or controlled substances.” The paper does not give a definite time-frame for this condition, nor does it further define good and lawful behavior in any way. These phrases will be paired on nearly every document I receive regardingthe case.Each inmate is expected to sign their form confirming that they understand the conditions. My sheet is pink and the man who asked me why I chew my hair is holding a brown form which I understand to mean that his charge is far more severe than mine. I sign my name, pass my sheet to him, and never see a copy of my form again.The magistrate proves to be the first person who is interested in helping anyone. He reiterates that the purpose of these meetings are meant for us to understand the charges against us and talking about or arguing the charges can be used against us later. He sees each inmate one-at-a-time and consistently gives what is likely the most optimistic verdict they could hope for. The first case he sees is from the women’s prison. The woman’s long, auburn hair makes it difficult for me to see her face. The magistrate says she’ll be put on bond. She begins weeping with joy.When the magistrate gets to me, he gives me the O.R. He asks me if I can afford an attorney or if I wanta public defendant. Not knowing any better, I say a public defendant to which he stops me and asks what I do. “I’m a professor,” I say. He then asks me how much money I earn in a year, and when I say my annual salary from two semesters of teaching three courses a semester,
12) he strongly suggests I hire an attorney. I’m thankful for him walking me through that situation like a toddler. My cellmate is originally put on bail, and after a little bit of bickering over the semantics of his encounter with the police and the plane he needs to catch (to which the magistrate reminds him that anything he says can be used as evidence) he is able to convince the magistrate to provide an O.R. We’re brought back to our cell before being discharged. Even though I received my verdict first, my cellmate is discharged and then it’s not for nearly another hour that I am too. Before he leaves he tells me that the correctional officers will hook my phone up to a computer and look through its contents “for legal reasons, and pervy ones too.” I don’t know if it invalidates what he says that my phone is dead when I get it back. In the meantime I sit on my mattress and think about the two strips of glass with the light behind them. A lie is a unique perlocutionary action because when one is aware something is a lie the lie loses effect (though one may still feel betrayed), but that works for words which the two strips of glass are not. I lay my body flat and try to meditate the glass strips into a lie. I start thinking about a song by The National, “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness,” which months before I had been telling people was the “song of our times” for its title alone, though I’m only thinking about it now. It’s true, the system does only dream in total darkness even though the lights inside never turn off.Every morning for the rest of the semester, in the darkness before sunrise, I consider this paradox: how am I waking up in my own bed right now?I continue the term teaching from 7:30 to 10:30 AM Monday through Friday, and continue commiserating over it with my neighbor as we carpool every morning. The morning I was in a holding cell, she assumed I had overslept (which I am prone to do and have done) until she saw I also wasn’t in the non-fiction workshop we were both in (her as a graduate student, and me as an
13) auditor). If I was in the cell for another day she would be the first to know that I was gone. The morning I was in the holding cell, I missed small group conference meetings with thirty of my sixty students. When I was in the cell, I imagined coming up with an intricate lie to tell my classes. I got in a major car accident with a drunk driver and spent the morning hospitalized, but then it became clear that I would have to fake my own recovery. When I walk into the classroom I see a few knowing smirks and so I say the truth: “obviously the charges were frivolous because I’m back already.”Maybe a little too much truth: “hopefully I’m the only professor you have that this happens to, but cases like mine happen in college towns.” Definitely too much: “give it a week-or-two and if you google search me, in addition to several of the poems I have published, you’ll also find my criminal arrest photos.” Their faces shift into states of shock and later, confusion.I try to lighten the mood as we shift into our scheduled discussion of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. “It’s good to be free.”The next week I fly down to Tampa for the AWPconference. I try to get dinner with my former cellmate but our schedulesdon’t align. I still appreciate the trip. When I return, I see a ticket in the mail for the traffic offense that my arrest escalated from. On the ticket my race is listed as white. I place the ticket on a stack of mail and consider the racial calculus: I don’t pass as white, but my arrest was near the end of the month, if they were fulfilling a quota, how accurate can any data collection on the racial breakdown of individuals stopped be?Time melts and freezes. Days pass in rapid succession for the rest of the semester until it is two-thirds of the way through and 50 of my 60 students still have no grades entered. Many of them rightfully ask why.
14) I deflect by saying “You know, I’ve had a hard semester. I presented at a conference and then I got arrested and then I went to another conference.”In the first unit of the semester, my students and I read over a series of essays (Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coastes, David Grann’s “Trial by Fire”, and the first chapter of “The Holographic Universe” by Michael Talbot). The students have to write an analytical paper using two of the readings. The most popular combination this semester was King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and Grann’s “Trial by Fire”, the two essays about incarceration. I imagine Martin Luther King Jr. sitting in his jail cell more vividly than I have in the past. Beige walls and crisp, orange jumpsuit. I don’t know how King wrote his letter (I guess they had access to writing utensils then). I think about my cellmate trying to compose a note using toothpaste and words torn out of the bible. I can only bring myself to quickly grade three papers.The town I live in is, jurisdictionally, two towns divided by a thin river, but functions de facto as one city. Despite the population being around 100,000 people and the fact that one could drive the diameter of both towns in less than an hour, there are two mayors and five police departments: the department for the town I live in, the department for the other side ofthe river where the university is, the university’s police department, the county sheriff’s office, and a department for a small down in the county.The presence of these police departments often causes visitors and new graduate students to comment on how many police cars circle downtown, but I’m now hyper-vigilant of the way they cut through back streets. The way how, when they pull someone over at night, their flashing
15) lights bloom onto buildings like fire. I notice when they patrol in groups of three cars or when a single officer stops an entire family.I become uncertain if I can live in another small town, which also gives me anxiety about a future in academia. Students continue emailing me about grades and the admins directly above me are similarly unhappy with my lack of progress. All the understanding the academy has shown me in regards to identity politics, feminist practices, activism, and Foucault’s work on the penal system have evaporated. In seven years of working in academia, it’s been commonplace to talk through my experience as a marginalized person in the University, but this is where I feel like I have become something fundamentally different. A mutant. What could the straight, white, cisgender administrators know about someone like me being swept into the men’s jail?The O.R. I received from the magistrate came with four court dates (an attorney conference, discovery conference, pre-trial, and jury trial) and the requirement that I acquire an attorney within ten days of being released. A colleague’s partner suggests I contact a former grad student who works at a law office. I know this former student from a seminar a couple years before, but was unaware she worked in law. I message her and she tells me cases like mine are fairly common in this townand sets an appointment for me to meet with her boss. He primarily works as a divorce lawyer but also does criminal justice. Our meeting runs at under 30 minutes. I’m not sure if that’s a good sign or not. He looks through the police report and touches on the things I hoped he would: the arresting officer’s descriptions of me “stuttering and shaking” and the fact that the search dog did not respond to my car—”hit” as my attorney puts it.
16) He says that depending on how long they had the dog on the scene and how long it took for them to inform me that there was a dog can constitute a fourth amendment violation. And in my case, the argument is plausible. That evening I read an article about how in 2015 the Supreme Court ruled that in a case in Nebraska, police officers violated the 4th amendment in what they deemed an “unreasonable seizure” when the officers used a search dog without a warrant during a routine traffic stop. My attorney says that he can make arrangements that I won’t need to attend the attorney conference and that while my case isn’t a guaranteed win, it is a low-ball.Two weeks pass without notice from my attorney so I walk down the court house, which is a convenient 9-minute walk down the street from my apartment, for my attorney conference. A friend gave me a piece of advice I wouldn’t have thought of on my own—wear a suit. I translate this into “I’m so angry, I could show up to court dressed like a man!”I only partially took this advice and put on a nice button-down andblazer with my skinny jeans. As I walk down the street I begin to feel an increasingly rare appreciation for life in the academy. Unlike the professors and grad students I regularly interact with, the legal system is not very good at giving directions. Thenotice with my court dates only say the day, time, and judicial officers’ names.I enter the courthouse. The first floor is two intersecting hallways that form a cardinal rose. I walk through the south and west corridors and try to figure out where I’m supposed to go. Eventually an officer tells me to go up to the second floor.I take the elevator up and find this arrangement of hallways to be even more labyrinthine. I find a wall that has the times listed for everyone scheduled with an attorney conference and make
17) my way into the room. Inside are a-dozen-or-so other people sitting in rows of chairs in front of the judicial officer who is a warm and bubbly woman in her early 30’s with a pastel blazer. She runs down the list of people scheduled for the session and when she has trouble finding someone she looks them up on her phone. I’m the most overdressed person in the room.She calls up five people who don’t have any defender (public or hired). She says that they’regetting offered a diversion and summarizes the terms of the offer. The five people are not allowed to use or possess alcohol or controlled substances for the next year, nor are they allowed to step foot in a bar, tavern, or liquor store while the diversion is in effect. They each waive their 4th amendment right to decline a search and seizure. If they are requested to take a drug test they must comply and pay for the test themselves. She assures them that they’d only be searched if they are suspected of any wrongdoing. She calls up another person and tells him that his attorney already has his offer and that he can go across the street to the public defendants’ office.When she gets to me she says: “Your attorney isn’t going to be here but I talked with him yesterday. You and himseem to be in good contact. You’re probably good to go.” I try to devise a way of asking what she means by “probably” but as she begins to say something a man walks through the door and briefly talks with her. He leaves and she has clearly forgotten her train of thought. She tells me that I can go and I should see if my attorney is at the public defendant’s office across the street as he has an office there he sometimes uses. She assures me that she’s marked my attendance so there will not be a warrant forme.The courthouse takes up an entire block and is surrounded on all four sides by streets: Main, 3rd, South, and 4th. I have a 25% percent chance of picking the right street so I cross South and walk into one of the law offices. I’m greeted by a secretary and ask her where the public defender's
18) office is. She leads me out and directs me to a large, unlabeled building around the corner on the adjacent street. I was close, at least.My attorney isn’t in the public defender's office and I try to call his cellphone and then his office number. One of his secretaries picks up and we schedule an appointment for Thursday.I assume I’m done and have learned for certain that, despite how the police treated me, the courts aren’t particularly concerned about my case.I walk around the corner to my regular coffeeshop for a happy hour beer. I drink my first beer in weeks and chat with a barista about Kubrick films like normal.When I meet my attorney, he says we’re at a crossroads. The first option is to keep fighting the charges, a battle that we are likely to win, but victory isn’t guaranteed. He explains that my case is a question of legality, not a question of detail. There’s no denying I was in possession, or that possession is illegal, but the steps the officerstook to discover my Adderall were themselves illegal. As my attorney says, “It's bullshit.”The other option is that the state is offering a diversion, the same offer made to the five people I saw in the attorney conference. The diversion form is a list of possible terms and conditions. Of all possible conditions on the list, half of them are checked. They include items such as the possibility of being searched without a warrant and having to comply with drug tests, if asked. The fourth amendment, which was broken in my arrest, still does not apply. Scrolling down I’m not happy to see that I have the same lines about good and lawful behavior, that I’m not allowed to use or possess alcohol, and that I’m prohibited from entering a bar, tavern, or liquor storeand that these terms last until March 1st of the next year. I’m more angry about this than the $333 fee I have to pay.
19) My attorney explains that the diversion is without a parole officer or drug counseling. No one is watching. My attorney tries to explainit another way. He can’t tell me to drink or not, but it becomes clear that police officers aren’t going to come to my home or into a bar to see if I’m drinking or not. I think about the judicial officer and the diversions she offered. How she said they would only be searched if there was a reason. It’s of the utmost importance to not create a reason for them to search me. After a few weeks of vigilance I have a nightmare where I walk out of my apartment and police cars appear as soon as my foot hits the sidewalk. I take this as a warning.He assures me that, realistically, what the good-and-lawful behavior line means is that if I were to be at a bar and get in a fight where the police have to be called, then the police can terminate the diversion in addition to what punishment they would serve me. I’m still unhappy with this equation and ask my attorney for a week-and-a-half to decide.I spend the weekend doing research. I learn that not only is the diversion the lowest punishment I can receive, above that is a deferral, which has the same terms as the diversion, but can also include a parole officer and drug counseling. I would have to report everywhere I go. I remember what my attorney said about there not being questions about the details of my case. I’m surprised they didn’t kick me while I was down with a deferral and wonder if the diversion is meant to keep me from fighting the charges in court. At first I find this to be an insulting compromise.I come to realize that the diversion is likely to be cheaper than challenging the case and accruing more fees from my lawyer. It’s almost the end of the school year and I don’t get paid over the summer, so this is an important factor. More importantly, I realize that the diversion makes it easier for me to continue about my life than continuing to center myself around it. Teaching
20) allows me to compartmentalize my life into semesters, maybe to the point that this whole incident can be boxed away along with my syllabus. I remember that my attorney said if the diversion is terminated the case restarts where we left off, if we continue fighting the diversion may not be on the table anymore.When the diversion is processed and signed by the prosecutor, I receive an email from my attorney’s office that the case is closed on their end. “But the diversion just started,” I think.At the end of the semester, I hold individual meetings with each of my 60-students. My grading schedule runs from 11:00 PM to 6:00 AM every day for a couple weeks so I have feedback to go over with each student for their meetings. We talk about their first two papers in the class in preparation for their finals portfolios. At the end of each session I try to apologize to each student for taking so long to grade. My regular script goes “As you know, I had this incident with the police and most of the rhetorical analysis papers were about ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ and ‘Trial by fire.’ I really imagine King in that jail cell so much more vividly.” Some students get the irony before I can finish. Another cuts me off at “incident with the police” to say that it was her “favorite part of the semester.” I tell her “It kind of is mine too.”I don’t tell her that my least favorite part is the paranoia. I save that part for my friends. “Paranoia andshame are forever.” I only tell my closest friends that sometimes when I see a police officer, I imagine mercilessly slicing his head off with a broadsword. Or shooting him. Or stealing his car and running him over with it.Much to my disappointment I don’t do any of these things. Instead I show up to the courthouse at the end of May and pay my diversion fee.
3
“Early Motherhood Has Always Been Miserable” By Jessica Grose.
“I declare if I tho’t I was to be thus occupied for the rest of my life,” one new mom wrote in 1828, “I would lie down & die.” By Jessica Grose Nov. 9, 2019
There are two diametrically opposed concepts of motherhood that dominate conversation in America today. There’s the Instagram influencer’s vision of the ideal mother with perfectly groomed, smiling children set against a backdrop of high-end appliances. And there’s the gritty real talk of comedians and writers like Ali Wong, who described her early days of motherhood as “a never-ending festival of feces.”But here’s what new moms need to know: The tension between the ideal and the real has existed for more than 200 years. Some version of the pristine influencer mother has been pushed on American women since the 1800s —and it’s always been a lie. If you look back through the diaries and journals of middle-and upper-class American women, you’ll see that theyhave been talking about the difficult reality of motherhood ever since the idea took hold that women were supposed to feel fulfilled by their maternal role.
In the Middle Ages, adults believed small children were hell-beasts. “Many educators,” Sharon Hays, a sociologist, wrote in her book “The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood,” “reminded parents of the child’s natural propensity for evil.” In Puritan New England in the 17th and 18th centuries, children were no longer considered demonic, but they were thought to be innately fallen and sinful. They needed thestrong moral guidance of their fathers to live a proper life —while mothers were praised for their fertility, they were considered too emotional to raise children, Ms. Hays points out.Womenin colonial-era America helped run family farms and small businesses, and they were deeply involved in the neighborly relationships that were required for survival, said Stephanie Coontz, the author of “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap.” By the time children were 6 or 7, they too were put to work. The actual day-to-day labor of raising the smallest children was left to older siblings or servants, if they had them, and there wasn’t widespread pressure to find pure joy in baby care.As economic production moved outside the home, the immediate family became a separate unit, independent of its neighbors. By theearly 19th century, what historians call “the cult of true womanhood” emerged. That was the notion that men faced the gritty, morally suspect outside world of moneymaking and politics, while morally superior women kept home and family pure.Because respectable, white, Christian, middle-class women no longer had a role outside the home, they were expected to find fulfillment and power in their positions as wives and mothers.Working-class white women and women of colorwere excluded from the cult of true womanhood —they always worked, and they never got any kind of societal respect or support for raising their own children. In fact, they were often forced to leave their own babies to help raise wealthier children.When the cult of true womanhood began to take shape, child-rearing manuals proliferated. They informed good Christian women that “every irritable feeling should ... be restrained,” because everything a mother did or did not do would stay with their child “eternally,” marring their souls, according to “Modern Motherhood: An American History,” by the historian Jodi Vandenberg-Daves.The pressure to stuff down every bad feeling while also raising unblemished children was starting to get to women by the mid-1800s; their diaries and letters express emotions that could have been written last week, save for the antiquated language. “I fear I am not very charitable towards babies,” wrote Loula Kendall Rogers after the birth of her first child in 1864, “as I find myself at such times wishing for a‘lodge in some vast wilderness, where the cry of babies might never reach me more.’”In her book “Scarlett’s Sisters,” the historian Anya Jabour describes the private ambivalence Rogers felt toward her son, the “hard” feelings because he was so colicky. She also describes Rogers’s disappointment in her absent husband, whom she expected to be more helpful. Ms. Jabour quotes another woman, Laura Wirt Randall, who is overwhelmed by the demands of her nursing baby. “I declare if I tho’t I was to be thus
occupied for the rest of my life,” Randall wrote in 1828, “I would —I was going to say —lie down & die.”Over time, the Victorian child-rearing manuals, describing the ideal mother whose “voice is always gentle” and “face is always kind,” morphed into the highly efficient mother of the 1920s and ’30s, who was not only responsible for the moral development of her children but also on the hook for their psychological and physical health. Parenting recommendations became aggressively scientific —babies were to be fed at strict intervals and weighed by pediatricians, which caused many mothers anxiety. Ms. Vandenberg-Daves quotes a woman who was so anxious about the quality of her breast milk that she was “tormented” by visions of her child getting rickets and “reduced to a state of melancholia.”At the same time, Freudian theory warned that it was dangerous for children to get too close to their mothers and that it was wrong for mothers to expect veneration. So women lost the reverence they had previously received from both their children and society, Ms. Coontz said. By the 1950s, we got the smiling and never-tired Donna Reeds and June Cleavers of black-and-white television: “a flyon the wall, but with the hands to stir coffee,” as Ms. Coontz described them.While Donna and June were beaming, toothy and unwrinkled, from television screens, maternal ambivalence was jumping from diaries and letters to published memoirs and magazine articles. By 1960, Ms. Coontz wrote in “The Way We Never Were,” “almost every major news journal was using the word ‘trapped’ to describe the feelings of the American housewife.”Redbook’s editors put out a call for responses from young mothers about why they felt trapped. They received 24,000 replies.Today’s Donna Reed is themomfluenceronInstagramwiththebeachywaves, Mont Blanc marble counter tops and diaphanous earth-toned wardrobe. Her cultural power still threatens to overwhelm all of the realistic, funny writing and performance of Ms. Wong, Angela Garbes, Nefertiti Austin and Amy Schumer, who are expanding our narrow andconfining definition of the “ideal mother.”Which is not to say that nothing has changed since the 19th century —there is much more of a dialogue about fathers doing their fair share of child care, different and unconventional family structures are a part of the cultural conversation, andconceptslikeemotionallaborare going mainstream.But it’s possible the idealized version of motherhood will always exist in some form, because you can’t fully accept what it’s like to care for an infant until you have one squalling in your arms in the middle of the night. Since becoming a parent is now more of an active choice for many women than it had been previously, the pressure to find it delightful remains a norm. And the nuclear family is still supposed to be able to raise kids without any outside help.
Each new generation of mothers will need searing honesty from their peers —because we can talk about how hard it is all day long, but until the moment new moms are experiencing it, they’re not really listening.
