mothersong

Seeing my Mother for the First Time
Here is an article I have in the works about my evolution as a feminist, and ultimately what it means to me now as a new mother . . . feel free to comment!

Just now I was reading a description of a new magazine called the "F" Word (Feminism being the word), and though obviously geared towards young women with fire in their panties about things like gawkers and whistlers, it reminded me of how fiery and passionate I used to be about the f word, and it got me thinking about what kind of feminist I have become now that I am a new mother and getting close to age thirty.

As a senior in High School I remember telling my literature teachers I wasn't going to read anymore white male authors, and I swore I would vomit if I had to suffer their monotony one second longer. I was a good student, and they must've appreciated my idealism somehow, because I was graciously assigned Langston Hughes, Isabel Allende, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Steinem . . . and the list goes on. I had shaved my head and a group of us swimmer girls boycotted shaving our legs altogether. This was in the early 90's, but I remember at least one night around a bonfire where bras were burned and after that we took to country drives we called "ball-hauling" where we drove and rode topless in my best friends huge van, flashing truckers with our boobs flat against the windows. Six of us formed an a cappella group I named after the Alice Walker poem "Revolutionary Petunia", and we sang songs from groups like Sweet Honey in the Rock about fair trade and abuse against women before we even knew that it would be cool. We just did what came naturally to us, and that was feminism.

I have always been a tomboy, so I didn't have to think long and hard about rebelling against the patriarchy because my father seemed to embody it by the way he could be heard demeaning my mother or telling her she was fat. Ironically, he told me I could be or do anything I wanted to, and supported or seemed strangely proud of the ways I showed my independence. I'm sure he never quite endorsed the shaved head, but he did back me completely me when I shipped off to Germany as an exchange student, barely 17 years old. I spent my entire summer before going earning money as the only girl on the local University's painting crew, lost my virginity to a Kenyan student who was much older and whom I was mostly attracted to out of sheer fear (which at that time meant needing to sleep with him), and spending my days climbing all of the trees in town with my best friend Brett.

I remember my first day of school at the German Gymnasium, when my teacher straight up asked me about the only question I would've understood in German at the time "Bist du eine Junge oder ein Maedchen?". The whole class giggled nervously, as I slowly translated her quick sentence which asked me if I was a boy or a girl. Blushing, I knew for certain I wasn't in Ohio anymore, and certain these German girls were nothing like the swim team grrls at home. I was on my own with this one. It seemed feminism was not quite so mainstream in conservative catholic Paderborn, Germany. So, I stuck my chest out, pointed to my C cup boobs underneath my "We Can Do It" Rosy the Riveter t-shirt, smiled and said "Maedchen".

In Germany I grew my hair out, and skipped classes at the local school because it seemed so formal and stuffy. Students still stood when answering a question and generally seemed to fear their teachers immensely, which I simply hated, and they all appeared to have no spine especially when put on the spot to help each other out. I once was humiliated by a teacher on the first day of German class who obviously hated Americans because he went off on a tirade about how his class was for Germans who could speak German and not for American exchange students. I sat in the front row while he publicly degraded me, and not one student stood up for me in that class. Afterward, I thought, if one of my teachers had done that to an exchange student in the US, I would've yelled back -- my friends would've too -- that's just how we were. We didn't take any shit, or any shit being doled out to someone else in our presence. This experience of German school was more like what my parents must've experienced, and my experience of American high school was more like having teachers be your friends, guiding and shaping you, not humiliating you. Later on I heard a rumor that this teacher had been a Nazi sympathizer. Creepy. So the next semester I had him for Geography and when I climbed the tower arriving late to class and he yelled at me as soon as he saw me, I starting screaming right back in the most threatening English profanity I could muster and reveled at the shock and surprise on his face. The whole class seemed to respond as if this was a revolutionary act, me standing up to the teacher that everyone feared and hated, and though I ran home crying hysterically from the incident, they all viewed me in a different light after that. I was the feminist American girl who stood up to mean teachers, and they continued to treat me with fear and wonder simultaneously.

Because I didn't find too many peers in school, I spent my days in various local "Kneipes" or pubs, journalling and writing long letters on thin blue air mail tissue paper back to my friends in the States. If I was melancholy before, I became even more so in Germany, trying to make sense of the person I was becoming, of the people I couldn't quite understand, but I adored my German families and they seemed to love me too. There were long, elaborate meals with wine and discussion that lasted late into the night, and trips as a family to the local spa where we hung out in saunas and foot baths in public naked. It was just no big deal getting naked around everyone else, and I loved it. This was something you would never see in the U.S.! At least twice a week my host parents would talk about the Second World War, something I previously knew nothing about except for Hitler and the Jews. It was as if they were always apologizing, everywhere I went, apologizing for their country and their people. I can imagine now that this is how I would be when traveling in the world where people, myself included, are so disgruntled about America's actions in the Middle East.

The Germans were a serious but extremely loving people, and I went with my host father to Paderborn's first memorial dedication to the Jews of Paderborn who were killed. They had placed in this large wall the salvaged original bricks of the temple that had once stood, along with the names of all the towns' Jews who had been exterminated. My host parents remembered, their own parents had stood over their cribs while the ceilings crumbled around them. These were things I had never heard about in my hometown. The world was opening itself up to me, and I to it.