Texan who was tricked by Used Husband into moving to Milwaukee. Fomenting feminist revolution based on potty parity, pockets, and psleeves. Bad bacon eater. Also, cats. Also, REVOLUTION.
This image has nothing to do with this post, but I am too lazy to look for images of shame and I love this poem.
Ten years ago, my friend Claudia, who lived in Texas, posted on facebook that she was selling a lot of her workout wear.
She was an exercise instructor – I met her at a Jazzercise class and we became fast friends – and I assumed she was just purging inventory.
I bought some of it, but there was a tiny judgy part of me that thought, “I would just give away my extras to my friends.”
When I was in high school, my friend Ramona never invited me to her house. She would come to my house, though, and we would go to movies together and we were in the CYO together and we sat next to each other on the bus and she was always happy to hang out.
(Although to my eternal shame, I called her one time to go to the movies and she couldn’t and my response was, “But I’ve already asked everyone else!” WHO SAYS THAT TO A DEAR FRIEND WHAT WAS I THINKING?)
(Like – it’s been 45 years and I still remember this and I still cringe in horror that I said something so thoughtless and cruel to someone I loved.)
Anyhow. She never invited me to her house. I don’t think I was ever once in her house.
When Mr T and I first moved to our house in Wisconsin, we noticed a middle-aged guy walking his dogs a lot, even in the middle of the day. The guy had an odd gait – leaning forward, with one stiff leg, hesitating with each step.
“Drunk,” Mr T and I said, rolling our eyes at each other. “Doesn’t have a job and lives in his mother’s basement.”
We called him The Weird Drunk Guy.
Seven years ago, I was in Austin and had lunch with Claudia.
She told me she was preparing to leave her husband, a tech executive who, it turns out, had been having hookups their entire marriage.
What’s worse, they were gay hookups.
It’s not bad that he was gay – it’s bad that he knew he was gay but had married her anyway as a beard. It’s one thing to make a deal with someone to be your beard, but to trick someone into thinking you love her and want to be with her? That’s platinum-level assholery there.
He didn’t share his income. He paid for the house, but anything else she needed – clothes, car, doctor, she had to pay for. From her earnings as an exercise instructor.
He had also taken out credit card applications in her name and run the cards to the limit on his auto-racing hobby.
She had no money.
When we were 32, Ramona’s mother took her own life.
Ramona is the one who found her.
That’s when Ramona told me that her parents were alcoholics and she was expected to clean the house every day after school and make supper.
She had never breathed a word of this when we were in high school and I never thought to ask.
A few years after we moved into our house, I was talking to one of my neighbors with dogs. I mentioned The Weird Drunk Guy and the neighbor said, “Oh you mean Doug? He has MS. He lives on disability. He walks as much as possible to slow the progression of his disease.”
When my neighbor told me what was really going on with Doug, I felt a flush rise in my face and I wanted to sink into the ground with shame.
I am a judgey, judgey person. I criticize people in my head all the time. I roll my eyes at things I think are dumb.
But damn almost every time I do that, I get more information and discover IATA.
I’m trying to be better. I am.
(Although I still totally judge trump voters.)
(I mean.)
(Although I am happy to forgive if they see the error of their ways and join The Revolution.)
My friend Lisa – she of the fascinating blog that mixes fashion and politics and philosophy – and I have been trying to figure out how Stephen Miller makes himself the hero of his own story.
What does he tell himself at night when he’s waiting to fall asleep and he’s going over his day in his mind? “I have rid the country of Dangerous People, including the Paleta Guy in California! American citizens can sleep better tonight!”
How does he twist the truth – the evil – of his actions to justify them?
How does he make evil beautiful?
The professor for one of my Shakespeare classes had us cast the plays with Hollywood actors. When we were casting “Othello,” we wanted to put someone like Danny DeVito, who had been playing villains, in the role of Iago.
My professor said no, it needed to be someone like Robert Redford.
“Evil is beautiful,” he said. “If it were ugly, it would be harder for it to seduce you.”
(A question I wish we had discussed as well is, “How did Iago make himself the hero in this story? Did he really believe Desdemona was cheating on Othello?”)
A friend said, “The devil comes to you as everything you ever thought you wanted.”
Evil doesn’t look like evil.
If evil looked like evil, most of us would reject it.
A friend’s parents discowned her.
Her son is gay. He does drag.
The son had not come out to his grandparents.
My friend – who knew what her parents are like – tried to keep the information about her son off facebook, but other people tagged her in some posts about the son’s drag show and her parents saw the posts.
They sent her a facebook message telling her that they would, in the future, be choosing not to put themselves in the same space as my friend and her son.
What story do you tell yourself to make yourself the hero for disowning your child and your grandchild?
What story do you tell yourself to make disowning your child and your grandchild the beautiful thing, not the evil thing?
In what world is your gay, drag-star grandchild so evil that you must reject him?
Let me rephrase that: In what world is your gay, drag-star grandchild more evil than a convicted rapist, felon, adulterous man who’s not even kin?
Because the added context that probably helps explain this story is that the parents are trumpers. (My friend is not.) That’s not to say that only trumpers reject gay grandchildren, but if you make a Venn diagram of “People who reject gay grandchildren who perform in drag” and “trumpers,” I bet you will have almost a perfect circle.
We live in a world where gay grandchildren are evil but masked men grabbing people off the streets and sending them to concentration camps is not evil.
Where cutting medical care for poor people is not evil.
Where forcing the family watch their pregnant, brain-dead daughter’s body exist on artificial life support until physicians finally have to cut the premature baby out of the the daughter’s decomposing body is not evil.
Where trying to rob people of their citizenship is not evil.
Where cutting funding for cancer research is not evil.
Where the heroes are the people who turn their backs on their children and grandchildren while embracing a dictator.
I have no answers except that we need to start calling evil by its name.
A report on Fox News this week declares, “According to the poll, 43% of White men, spanning all age groups, say they are self-censoring their speech at work, and an additional 25 million men claim they’ve not been given jobs or promotions because of being White men.” A few things to note off the bat: the Fox piece links to a New York Post piece which links to a YouTube video for a podcast series titled “White Men Can’t Work,” that says it’s about about “the huge mental health toll on men – who are anxious about doing or saying the wrong thing at work. Self-censorship has become the norm.”
Go read the whole thing. While I wait, I will try to think of anything – anything at all – to add to her wonderful, insightful piece.
Like – in my own experience and that of my women friends – how we, too, self-censor at work.
We self-censored by not saying, “But that was my idea!” when a man was praised for suggesting something.
We self-censored when a client – at a lunch he proposed – put Kenny G on in his car (client was driving) and asked 38-year-old you how was it that you weren’t married yet?
We self-censored when the white male VP sighed and said that it was so hard it was for white men when he was looking for his first job in the late ’70s.
We self-censored when the partner made crude sexual jokes and then laughed and said, “Remember I’m the one who does your performance evaluation.” (We got a new job – five states away.)
We didn’t self-censor when we had a temp job for $15/hour (in 1993, when damn you could pay your Austin, Texas, rent with $15/hour) and the boss asked us on a date. We told the boss we didn’t think it was a good idea to date the boss and the next day, the temp agency called and said the client had cancelled the contract.
We didn’t self-censor enough with the boss who told us we used “too many big words that make people feel stupid.” That was the one where when the boss had to lay off one person on the team of ten, he picked you.
We didn’t self-censor enough with the bosses who told us we were too direct, too intimidating, too – whatever.
Whether we self-censored or not, it never worked to our benefit.
But I have told these stories before. I want to hear yours. Tell me.
American history is all about colonization and imperialism, but this was extra
This bridge crosses the Panama canal and connects North America to South America. Because of the way Panama twists, we would see the sun rising over the Pacific on our way to school every morning. Photo by Redney on Pexels.com
When I was in high school, I lived in the Panama Canal Zone.
Let me rephrase that.
When I was in high school, I lived in one of the last outposts of American colonialism and imperialism and state-sponsored segregation and racism.
I didn’t realize it at the time. I was a teenager; I lived on a US military base, which was integrated – the US military is one of the most integrated parts of US society; and at my Panama Canal Company high school, they weren’t exactly teaching us that we lived in a racist, segregated colonial outpost.
But I was there. And I am kind of horrified that I never noticed the things that Michael Donoghue, a Marquette history professor, wrote about in his book Borderland on the Isthmus.
He notes the segregation – literal segregation – in the Zone. As in white Zonians lived one place, Black Zonians another. The Company dictated where its employees lived – it was a company town. That is, people worked for the Company, which also ran the housing, the police force, the train, the movie theatre, the stores, and pretty much everything else in the Zone.
After the canal was built, the Canal Zone became a government-run “company town” with housing, schools and businesses exclusively for American citizens. The Canal Zone was racially segregated until 1954, with Black and white workers given separate “gold” and “silver” jobs. Their families attended segregated schools and used separate bathrooms and recreation facilities.
“The Canal Zone was not a normal place,” says Maurer. “It was essentially run like a giant military base, but also like a socialist enterprise. Everything was operated by the U.S. government, even franchises like McDonald’s.”
He explains that the Zone was also basically a sundown town. That Panamanians weren’t allowed to enter the Canal Zone unless they worked there. That Panamanians couldn’t even have professional jobs in the Zone until the early 60s, which was when one of my high-school friend’s father was hired as the first Panamanian police officer in the Zone.
(And yes it is very strange to read a book and see a name you recognize. I felt the same way in a Latin American history class in college where we read Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express and I saw the name of the father of my ninth grade best friend. Mr Dachi was the US Embassy official who had helped Theroux in Panama.)
What I do remember – and what my friend Jane, who was my biology lab partner, also remembers – is the entitlement and bitterness that the Zonians had – and still have! – over the Canal Zone treaty, which was signed while we were in high school.
Let me back up.
The US helped Panama engineer a coup to reach independence from Colombia. Then the US took over building the canal from the French. When the canal was done, the US maintained a colony in the Canal Zone, a strip of land bordering the canal, with white Americans living in a few distinct housing areas and the Black descendants of the West Indians who built the canal living in others.
The US also established military bases in the Zone. I lived on one of the bases, which had its own elementary school, but for middle school and high school, all the military kids and the Zonians went to the Company schools. Rich Panamanians and embassy people also sent their kids to my high school (they had to pay tuition).
My high school was full of cliques, but I thought it was just theatre kids vs athletes with some division as well between Zone and military, but it turns out that even with the Zonians, there were differences. The Zonians who had been there for three generations considering themselves very different from (superior to) the rest of us, including teachers in Zone schools and other newcomers.
Jane (whose parents were teachers in the Zone schools) and I were comparing notes on what we have learned as adults that makes us look back at our time in the Canal Zone (she now lives in Canada) and go WHAT THE HELL?
She recommended a book to me – Canal Zone Daughter, a memoir written by a woman whose family moved to the Zone in the late 1950s, when the author was a little girl.
The book is described thusly:
In Canal Zone Daughter, [the author] chronicles her unique childhood culminating to the crushing loss when former President Jimmy Carter signs treaties that effectively eliminates her – and fellow U.S. citizens’ – former home.
That was my first clue that this woman did not look back on her childhood with any insight. Yes, of course it’s a loss for your childhood home to change. But that happens to all of us everywhere. Nothing stays the same. We do experience things one way, but as we age and gain experience and (I hope) wisdom, we can review our past critically. Was it really as rosy as we remember?
The author writes about how the Black people lived in another neighborhood. About her family’s maid – that she and her siblings started to boss their live-in maid around and rather than tell them not to do that, the mom just fired the maid instead. About going to a Panama City casino when she was in high school. About American Canal Zone workers protesting with a sickout, comparing their efforts to the Alamo. About how the US “gave” the canal to Panama instead of returning it.
And she just leaves it all there.
I have to admit it has taken me more time than it should have to realize having space for a live-in maid in base housing was kind of weird. But I went to that same casino when I was in high school and even then, I was thinking, THIS IS BIZARRE DO HIGH SCHOOL KIDS GO TO CASINOS IN THE STATES?
As far as returning the canal to Panama – I didn’t care so much about that. It was just another place where I lived for a while. I wasn’t emotionally attached – I had never considered Panama to be my home.
But when I learned more about what happened in the Zone and with the treaties, I realized returning the canal was definitely the right thing to do. In the documentary Carterland, they explain that Panamanian President Omar Torrijos was asking the US if it really wanted to have to defend the both sides of the 51-miles-long border of the Zone from terrorism. As in, how many soldiers was the US prepared to send to Panama to stand guard? And in his book, Dr Donoghue explains that the US had been trying to get rid of the canal since the 1960s.
“Economically, the Panama Canal was extremely important for the United States before World War II, but after that its economic importance declined rapidly,” says Maurer, author of The Big Ditch: How America Took, Built, Ran, and Ultimately Gave Away the Panama Canal. “And by the time Jimmy Carter decided to take the political risk of giving it back, its economic importance to the United States was almost nothing.”
The author of the memoir does not look back with any criticism. She is angry and is still convinced something was stolen from her. At no point does she say, “When I was a kid, I thought it was normal for middle-class people to have a live-in maid but now I realize that is something that works only when there is a colonial system with huge wage disparities.” At no point does she say, “When I was a kid, I thought it was normal that all the white people lived in one place and the Black people in another, but now I realize that WOW that was Jim Crow segregation and it was wrong!”
Even in her amazon blurb, she writes “Charming, funny, and poignant, the author captures her remarkable American story in an exotic place and time.” Because imperialism and systemic racism is “exotic?”
Although many of the reviewers echo the author’s sentiments – that something was taken from them unfairly, other Zonians in the reviews know better. This reviewer mentions the slums (emphasis mine). I remember them. We saw them every morning from the bus on our way to school. I had never seen poverty like that before.
Missing is the dark side of Panama. A few steps from my house a chain link fence separated our military base from the Curundu river and a slum called Hollywood. Houses made from salvaged plywood and tin roofing stood on stilts to escape the frequent flooding. No electricity, running water or sanitation. It must have been difficult to stare through that fence at our houses with their soft lighting, glowing TVs, and bug lights in well tended gardens. We did not go to bed hungry, nor could we conceive what that was like. We Americans did not create Hollywood, but it was the other side of the coin from our beautiful life. It helps to remember both the good and the bad. Still I would recommend this book, so people will know how special our life was there and how rich it made us. We were a band of brothers and sisters, all in for every new experience, made wiser by the gain and loss of “home”, a happy few in paradise, naive to the pain around us, with eyes forever dissatisfied by ordinary stateside life that lacks the tropical light and shadow preserved in our memory.
Another former Zonian wrote this (emphasis mine):
Having lived in Panama for many years…. I was enchanted with this delightful adventure….Along with the laughter she provides, [she] also covers the sadness of the inevitable and eventual turn over of the Panama Canal and the zone to Panama. Despite the tremendous disappointment so many felt at what seemed a betrayal of their way of life (and at the time it was!), most came to realize the international implications of a remaining U.S. “colony” abroad.
I know there is so much I don’t know. And I know I still hold beliefs that need to change.
But I also know that I did not write an entire book about my childhood without ever once thinking critically about what I was writing. The author even has a PhD, so must know how to do research. Surely she could have learned a little more about the history of the canal and woven that information into her book?
I can absolutely see writing events as I remember them. Much of what she writes is fun and interesting and made me think “I remember that!” Of course you record your history as you remember it.
But – does she not remember the graffiti painted on the walls in Panama City? The strikes? The bomb threats? The slums? The fact that her dad probably worried about his employees getting thrown into a Panamanian jail? (My dad worried about his airmen carousing in town and getting into trouble – getting them out of jail was not easy.) Because I sure do. And I didn’t even spend my entire childhood there.
This image is from Puerto Rico, but the same sentiment was expressed in Panama: “Yanqui go home” and “Gringo go home.” Source
You write what you remember but then, you look back with a critical lens of, “Is there more to this story?”
I’m trying to figure out why I am so angry about this book. After all, it’s a tiny self-published memoir that almost nobody read.
But it makes me think of so much of what is happening today.
That plantation in Louisiana that burned to the ground and the subsequent lamenting from some white women who had such fond memories of getting married there.
The older white woman who told me on facebook, “I am not fond of his personality either but I love most every policy he and his marvelous cabinet have put into place or that he promised in his campaign. Enough said. I voted for Obama who reintroduced racism back into the country. Will never vote Democrat again.”
(Also WTF? “Reintroduced racism?” Because racism had been eradicated before Obama was elected?)
Another older white woman who wrote, “Try doing your own research. What about the watseful spending approved in the New Green Deal? What about the lies that #46 was in the ball? I am not a health care professional but I am a caregiver and work with dementia patients often. I could see the signs of dementia in 46 before the 2020 election. They used and abused that poor man. They lied to the American people and put our country in danger by having a man in Office who was not cognizant enough to do his job. They are death and darkness using the murder of unborn children to gain votes. They support homosexuality and use it to get votes when it is an abomination to God. Read your Bible and do some research using non main stream media.”
The people who shrug at American citizens with cancer – little children – being sent out of the country because their mothers are undocumented immigrants. At children being zip-tied in preparation for being deported. At masked unidentified men grabbing people off the streets and throwing them into unmarked vans. At the regime arresting judges it does not like. At a US senator (Hi Joanie Ernst!) smirking as she tells a constituent worried about Medicaid cuts that “we are all going to die.”
All of the people with privilege who refuse to see that privilege.
All the people who refuse to examine their beliefs in the face of new evidence. They think they are safe, so why do they care?
Jane points out, “There’s a lot of power in being able to say to people ‘I used to believe x, and then I learned z, so now I think differently.'”
But that only works if people are open to new information.
I think this person has never actually washed clothes but it’s what shows up when I search on “folding laundry.” What it really looked like when I helped my friend Leigh fold laundry while she fed her new baby was a little less pristine. Also – seriously – knitted underwear? Photo by Dziana Hasanbekava on Pexels.com
What do you do when your friend has a baby?
Do you fold laundry with her while she feeds the baby?
Do you hold the baby while your friend takes a nap?
Do you wash the dishes and clean the counters and maybe even wash the kitchen floor while your friend sits on the sofa with the baby?
Do you tell her that you’re going to the grocery store and ask her if she needs anything?
Do you drop off a tray of brownies and leave?
Or do you show up on her doorstep expecting to be entertained?
Much like throwing yourself a party where the guests are expected to bring gifts – hence the prohibition against family organizing showers, even, because it is kind of tacky for you or your family to ask people to give you things, there are things that are Tacky and Not Done.
(Like throwing yourself a military parade for your birthday using someone else’s money just saying.)
Things that are Tacky and Not Done, at least according to me:
Asking for cash instead of a gift, even though I totally get preferring cash to say, a photo of one’s in-laws with the option of two frames, or a life-sized cast-iron sculpture of a cat. Or a potted Meyer lemon tree. Or nesting tables painted with hibiscus. That is, no matter how awful the gifts are, you are really not supposed to ask for cash instead. BUT SISTER I GET IT and I send cash as much as possible because yeah, newlyweds need cash more than they need a fondue pot.
Not thanking people for their gifts, although again, once someone starts giving you crap you don’t want and would never want and using it as a way to demand reciprocity, how do you craft your thank-you to reflect the fact that you absolutely hate the item? I have been there.
Assuming other people will pay for your meal when you go out on your birthday. Looking at you, college freshman year roommate who, when the check came, didn’t put in any money and we couldn’t figure out why there wasn’t enough cash until we finally realized that L, the roommate, who had invited herself to go with us to get pizza, wasn’t tossing in anything. I don’t remember how we resolved it, but my friends and I were very careful not to go out with L again and the next year, I found a different roommate.
Not having lunch food in your house for guests just because you don’t eat lunch. Damn, people – if you invite a guest to your home, you feed that guest! All three meals! And you have coffee, even if you don’t drink coffee. I didn’t start drinking coffee until a few years ago, but I always had coffee for guests.
I guess that’s it on the Tacky for me.
OH WAIT NO.
I have another Tacky item.
Back to the baby.
When your friend has a baby or other life event that consumes them and causes them to lose sleep and maybe miss work and in general, is disruptive, what do you do?
You take food!
Yes! We all know this! You take food. You take food for life and for death.
You make a casserole or brownies (or both) and you tape a note to the casserole with the cooking/warming/freezing instructions. You prepare it in a container that does not need to be returned. You text your friend and ask when you can drop the food off and when she answers, you drop the food off. You might knock on the door, you might not. Either way, you deliver the food AND THEN YOU LEAVE.
This is the important part:
You
Leave.
You do not show up with food when there is a new baby (and probably not in any other circumstance) and invite yourself into the house.
Where you then proceed to wait for the new parents to cook your casserole.
And then not help clean up.
While you drink the bottle of wine you brought with you.
You do not demand hosting from new parents.
Yes this story is true and yes, my friend remembers it as if it were yesterday, even though her kids are grown and out of the house. And yes, she is still plotting her revenge.
They are trying to take us back to the dark ages but some of us are already there
When I was canvassing for Kamala last fall during early voting, I ran into a woman who was not on my list. My habit is to talk to everyone I see, so I asked her if she had voted yet.
No, she had not.
Indeed, she said, “I don’t vote.”
“Ever?” I asked.
“No,” she answered.
“Why not?”
“My husband gets mad,” she told me.
My husband gets mad.
She was 79 years old and she had never voted because it would make her husband mad.
She had had a career – she had been an art teacher and had traveled all over the world. She was sharp and clear, telling me about the native plants in her garden.
But she had never voted because her husband did not want her to vote.
I told her she could sneak out to Serb Hall for early voting and register there. (Wisconsin has same-day registration.) All she needed, I told her, was her drivers license.
She doesn’t drive anymore and her license has expired.
This is how you vote in Wisconsin.
First, you register.
To register, you show proof of residence, which can be a driver’s license or a bank statement or a utility bill. (Or even a traffic ticket! Any official government document with your address on it.)
Then to vote, you need a photo ID, which can be a driver’s license or state ID or a passport.
To get an ID, you need a certified birth certificate, a social security card, and a proof of residence.
You can request the certificate and social security card (VoteRiders.org will help), but where do you have them mailed if you don’t want your husband to know?
Then you need to go to the DMV to get the DL or the ID.
If you don’t drive and can’t get a ride, it’s hard to get to the DMV. You can get there by bus but not easily.
How do you vote if you are married to an abusive man?
How do you vote if you don’t have a drivers license anymore and none of the bills or accounts are in your name and you don’t know where your birth certificate is?
And now, with the proposed SAVE Act (really, SAVE America for white men only is what it should be called), throw in finding a copy of your marriage certificate?
How do you vote if you have to keep it secret?
I have also encountered some men who had never voted – at least three white men, ranging in age from late 20s to mid 70s.
The difference between the men and this woman?
The system already works for white men.
How do you convince a white man to care about voting? About who’s in office? No matter who’s there, things usually go pretty smoothly for white men – at least, compared to women and minorities. White men aren’t losing their reproductive rights. They don’t worry when a cop pulls them over. The know they are favored in the job market.
And if they don’t care about anyone else, then what do you say?
They know they will be fine and that’s enough for them.
I begged the woman to figure out a way to vote. “We have a chance to make history,” I told her.
“No,” she told me. “Someone will see me and tell him. You’ll get your chance to make history later.”
This is me. I had my own room when we lived in Spain, which was a big deal. It was the maid’s room. That’s what the room was officially called. The houses on a military base had maid’s rooms.
There was a maid’s room in our house in the Panama Canal Zone, too. It was the room you see on the ground level in the photo below. It had its own little bathroom and wasn’t a bad spot, but again, nobody I knew had a live-in maid – not even the base commander. My mom used our maid’s room for her darkroom.
This was not our house, but it was down the street from us. There were avocado and mango trees all over the place. I discovered I liked mangos – my dad built a mango-picking tool and collected them, but he could not convince me to try avocados. I was such a fool.
And it just hit me now – decades later – how bizarre this was.
Who thought – not just once but for at least two bases, on different continents, “US servicemen and their families OF COURSE WILL HAVE LIVE-IN MAIDS?”
What architect thought, “We need to design base housing so people have room for their maids to live with them?
Had these people ever met anyone in the military?
Did they know what people in the military are paid?
(Hint. Not very much. Plus you get to risk death as part of your job description!)
I didn’t know a single person in the military who had a live-in maid. Not one.
We did have a cleaning lady, but she came only once a week, and the only reason that was possible was because Spain was so desperately poor at the time that even on a serviceman’s salary, it was affordable to have someone occasionally.
Even as a Peace Corps volunteer in Chile, I had a cleaning lady. I paid her four times the market rate – it felt wrong to pay someone only five dollars for an entire day’s work.
But she didn’t live with me.
I’m trying to think of how one might justify a maid’s room in base housing.
This person below wrote about the maids’ quarters on the base in Germany. Maybe they were originally created as a form of social security? As a way of creating jobs for the local population?
I can see that. This writer even notes that as the German economy improved after the war, Americans could no longer afford maids.
My Dad took this photo from the maid’s quarters. The maid’s quarters were on the fourth floor with the dormer windows. Originally set up as living areas for the German maids employed by servicemen, by the late ’50s and early ’60s, they had become temporary quarters for those waiting for an apartment to become available. I liked staying in the maid’s quarters because they were huge. There were 10 rooms with a long hallway to play in.
There was a small kitchen area and a common bathroom area. I don’t remember them ever being used as maid’s quarters in the time we lived overseas due to the tightness of housing during the cold war era and as the economy became better for the Germans, Americans could not afford maids anymore.
My dad was stationed at that base my senior year of high school and then college.
We lived off base – base housing was tight, but still, I knew nobody who had a live-in maid. Nor did I know anyone with a cleaning lady at all. We were back in the US, with pay that did not benefit from a huge differential with the local economy.
And they are still, in the Year of Our Lord 2025, promoting a maid’s room.
For military housing.
That’s bad enough.
But why did it take so long for me to question it?
Could you stay with a partner who had voted for that guy?
I’m not talking about someone who voted for him in 2016, although even that is less than desirable. My mom voted for him then – because of abortion – but it took her almost no time at all to grow to vocally hate the man. I mean, this is a woman who Does Not Talk About Politics but who will now willingly volunteer how despicable he is and has entered the world of election volunteering, working the polls and helping cure mail-in ballots.
Even a few days when I spoke to her about how we have crazy maga relatives, she noted that she and her five living siblings all hate the man.
So I guess if someone voted for him in 2016 and has seen the error of her ways and made the necessary corrections, I can forgive.
But what if someone you love voted for him in 2024?
What then?
A friend from high school – a friend who spent years working at as an immigration lawyer in Arizona and who has always been concerned and active about the rights of others – is married to someone who supports that guy.
They have been married for a long time – before that guy came onto the scene – and own property and have children together, so splitting up would not be that easy.
But what about someone you live with but are not married to? No kids? What do you do then?
My friend in Chicago, Chloe, went to her first protest yesterday. She went with a neighbor, Sophie, an experienced protester who works for a non-profit that helps undocumented immigrants who have been trafficked. This is Sophie’s life work – she has always been involved in social justice and cares passionately about the cause.
Her organization is about to lose its funding because of that man. So it’s not just that now these people will not be served, but Sophie will be unemployed.
She confessed that her partner – she has been living with this guy for years but is not married to him and they have no children – voted for that guy last November. He said it was because his small business had lost too much business to China.
Sophie was furious and told her partner he was selfish. Didn’t he care about anyone else? she asked.
No. He does not.
And he is happy with the tariffs because his business is picking up again.
What would you do?
(PS Names and situations have been altered to protect identities but the basic issue is “Do you stay with a partner who voted for and continues to support that guy?”)
This post is not about politics! (I couldn’t find an image of women hating women that didn’t include the president’s name and damn I do not want to show that guy at all on this page.)(So I guess it’s all political after all.)
But about something that can be just as toxic: family.
Until I met Mr T’s family, I did not know how awful family could be. I had always dismissed stories of bad families with a bit of (internal) “Well what did you do to deserve their anger?”
I blamed the victim.
I was so wrong.
(Honestly that has become the story of my life in the past few years, as I have learned about systemic racism and the patriarchy and – well – everything. I. Was. So. Wrong.)
The first time I met Mr T’s parents – we went to their home in Florida, getting up at 4:00 a.m. to get on a plane, fly to Jacksonville, rent a car, and then drive an hour to their house (That is, we spent money on plane tickets and a car – they didn’t pick us up), they pretty much ignored me.
We got to their house at about 1:00 p.m.
Now I don’t know about you all, but the second someone crosses the threshold of my house, I ask if they want something to eat and/or drink.
NOBODY WILL THIRST OR HUNGER IN MY HOME.
Mr T’s parents barely looked at me.
We sat in the living room and they talked to Mr T.
Nothing to me.
No questions.
No interest in me at all.
To be fair, they were disposed not to like me. I had asked Mr T to make sure we would not be sharing a bedroom at their house because I thought it would be too weird to sleep in the same bed as my not-married-to boyfriend under his parents’ roof.
Turns out they got all pissy about that, not necessarily because of any moral issues but because it meant they needed to clear some of the junk out of the spare room so Mr T would have a place to sleep.
They did clear a small space, but barely, and when they died ten years later, Mr T still had to throw out a ton of crap. They never did do any Death Cleaning.
(Also, Mr T had given them the link to my old blog, where I wrote a lot about my opinions, many of which I no longer hold because I WAS WRONG. I should note that this was 20 years ago and I never indicated I would support a would-be dictator which would be reason for them to reject me but of course I did and I do not. He didn’t even think about their not liking my opinions – he just thought I was a good writer and they would like it.)
(He was very, very wrong.)
(Although the main reason they never liked me is because they saw love as a zero-sum game and any love Mr T gave to me was love he was taking from them.)
Like – they didn’t ask me one single question about myself.
NOT ONE.
Not even, “How did you meet Mr T? Isn’t he the most wonderful person you have ever known? Let’s talk about how amazing he is.”
Nope. Not even that.
After about 30 minutes, 30 minutes of waiting for them to offer me water or lunch or even a damn snack, I was getting very thirsty. So I asked if I could have a drink of water.
Without looking at me, they told Mr T to get it for me and carried on.
I followed Mr T into the kitchen and whispered, “I’m hungry! Are they going to give us lunch?”
To which he replied that they didn’t eat lunch.
My friends.
Years ago, I didn’t drink coffee, but I made sure to have it in my cupboard in case a guest wanted it.
That is Host 101.
You feed your guests.
Our relationship did not get any better and when they were especially bothered about something – like Mr T not spending every holiday with them, which he did for the first few years after his divorce and before he met me, they blamed me.
Mr T’s parents – especially his mom – got angry not with him but with me if they didn’t get the letters they expected or the thank-you notes or the birthday gifts or the mother’s and father’s day acknowledgments they wanted.
We women are in charge of the thank you notes and the birthday cards and the relationships. If a relationship is bad, it is clearly our fault.
But even though I know it’s always The Woman’s Fault, I was still surprised at how this letter to the advice columnist turned out.
The letter writer blames the sister-in-law for the bad relationship the letter writer has with the letter writer’s brother – which yeah, OF COURSE IT’S THE SISTER-IN-LAW’S/WOMAN’S FAULT, but when I figured out – at the end – that the letter writer is also a woman, I gasped.
The fact that her brother doesn’t call her isn’t on her brother but is on her brother’s wife?
WTAF?
From the Washington Post (yes, I know. We cancelled month ago but they are still giving us access)
Although I’m six years older than my brother, I have always considered us close. After our parents passed many years ago, that all seemed to change. I’m thankful for holidays and our birthdays as they are now the only time I get a phone call. On every anniversary of our mom and dad’s birth or death day, I have texted a “Thinking of” message to my brother. He has always responded. This year, on our father’s birthday, I didn’t text him as I was sick with covid and pneumonia. I did receive a quick text of acknowledgment late that night. Within my response, I let him know of my illness. He replied with a “Get well soon.”
At 72, this recent illness had me down for more than a month. I expected that he’d phone to check on me but I’ve yet to receive one.I’m reevaluating my relationship with my brother. Although he’s an intelligent man, a good father and husband, he’s married to a demanding wife who hasn’t encouraged me and my husband to be close with them nor my nieces and nephews. When my husband and I visit once or twice a year, we feel it’s more of an obligation on their part than a warm connection. I’m tired of it.
(I am assuming this is a heterosexual couple because of the age of the writer.)
The LW is unhappy about the relationship with her brother and it’s all the sister-in-law’s fault.
Why is the SIL supposed to encourage a close relationship? Why isn’t the brother at fault?
(And let’s not even get into the fact that the LW visits once or twice a year – does the LW invite the brother and SIL to her house? Is the brother even inviting the LW or is she inviting herself? Twice a year visits would be a lot. And what’s keeping the LW from contacting the nieces and nephews directly and developing that relationship on her own? SO MUCH WRONG WITH THIS LETTER.)
(I also think death anniversaries are weird weird weird. Yeah, I think about my dad on his death anniversary, but my family and I don’t make A Thing about it.)
Anyhow I have no words of wisdom about this situation or about anything, really, except that I needed to unlearn my own internalized misogyny when I was confronted with it from Mr T’s mother. It wasn’t easy to undo decades of programming and I’m sure I’m still not done.
But damn I am starting to understand – not approve – understand a bit some of the women who voted for that guy. They hate themselves and they hate other women.
It’s like I don’t want to admit that part of my life is over
There are clothes in my upstairs closet that I have not worn for over ten years. For over 15 years.
But I cannot bring myself to get rid of them.
What is wrong with me?
(Yes, I know much of what you see is coats – but there are regular clothes in the back.)
For one, a lot of these things don’t even fit me any more. And I don’t know who I am fooling with the idea that someday, I might be suddenly 20 pounds lighter and that gorgeous pink boucle sheath dress with the matching jacket will magically slide over my hips.
That’s just not going to happen. (Unless I get cancer or some other wasting disease, in which case I would suspect having old clothes finally fit would not be much comfort.)
(Although I could use that dress as my burial outfit.)
(Except I have already arranged for my body to go to the medical school and there is no open casket after medical school.)
(But now I am wondering if you can have open casket before your body goes to the school?)
(Hmm. I don’t think so – I think you cannot be embalmed for the medical school.)
(And I wouldn’t want open casket anyhow – first of all, caskets are crazy expensive – I want to be wrapped in a sheet and buried under a tree; and second, the makeup they do is awful – my dad’s makeup looked horrible.)
Where was I?
I have all these clothes. A lot of them don’t fit my body, but some still do.
What they don’t fit is my life.
I no longer live a life of Hard Clothes. Of dressing nicely.
To those of you who do, Respect! I do have friends who do their hair and makeup every day and wear Nice Things. I applaud their energy.
But I am lazy.
I haven’t put on makeup in years.
When lycra tights, a t-shirt, and a sweatshirt are inappropriate, I wear the uniform I have developed: jeans, a long-sleeved black shirt, and Italian boots. (I am not ready to compromise on shoes.)
I wear that everywhere that lycra cannot go.
Yes, even the symphony. (This is Milwaukee – it’s not just that it’s a casual place, it’s that wearing high heels and short skirts is unsafe and really uncomfortable for many months of the year.)
So. Given that I wear either running tights (you don’t have to be running to wear them) or jeans, why do I even need a bunch of skirts or fancy dresses or sequined tops or cute pink boxy jackets?
It’s not like my life is going to suddenly become a swirl of fancy parties where sequins are required. I don’t even want that kind of life! I hate going out! I want to stay home and read.
Why am I keep clothes for a life I do not have now and probably will never have?
Texan in Exile 