Greetings and Apologies

If you happen to have found this site through any of my recent online forays, welcome! If on the other hand you’ve been hanging around here waiting for something new to happen ... well, sorry. Please feel free to check out any of those aforementioned forays. In May, I had Main Street Journal columns on the blessed and cursed Memphis music scene and a local perspective on the Time Magazine attachment parenting kerfuffle. I also had the honor of publishing a somewhat mortifying memoir on Punchnel’s.

I took a brief summer break from columnizing, but will be back on the home page of Main Street Journal on Tuesday, June 19. I hope you’ll stop by. 

Time Out of Mind: The Problem with (Un)Covering Motherhood

In an era of ever-dwindling relevance, Time sure figured out how to get its name out there. (I mean, quick, what’s the last Time cover you remember prior to last week’s?) Turns out, putting a photograph of a woman with a breast exposed to feed a nursing toddler is pretty much ignored on a Whole Foods magazine rack, but when placed on the cover of a mainstream news weekly, sparks one the most fundamental and potently emotional debates in our culture. No, not “what is the right/best way to parent.” The true question stemming from that cover was, “How self-absorbed do they think mothers are?”

That Time cover and accompanying story were publicity bait, seemingly intended solely to get shared thousands of times on Facebook among the technologically-active attachment parenting community, as well as those equally opposed to it. The first time I saw the cover, I mentally braced myself for the comment threads to follow. I was pleasantly surprised when the most frequent reaction I saw instead was, “Oh, come on.” The cover was so over-the-top, its aggressive “Are you mom enough?” headline so obvious, that it didn’t warrant a response. If there’s anything we’ve learned from the recent so-called “mommy wars,” it’s that no one wins. There is someone on the other side of every parenting issue, and neither side can claim victory. The sentiment I saw over and over was, mothering is hard enough without us judging each other. In short: we’re not taking the bait.

In case the pointlessness of Time’s story wasn’t clear enough, there was another magazine story, coming out of Memphis, that spelled it out in no uncertain terms. If you want a hard-hitting story about the true hazards of mothering, skip over Time and pick up a copy of Glamour. Yes, Glamour. The May issue features four women who are dedicated to lowering the infant mortality rate in Memphis, which is currently the worst in the United States. Local mothers Brittany Spence and Kenyatta Collins-Bolden, nurse Tonya Taylor, and social worker Netasha Bowers, among a growing legion of others, have taken an active role in increasing the number of babies born in Memphis who see their first birthdays. They have had measurable, significant success, but the fight is nowhere near over. The fact that this is a battle still needing to be fought in a major city in the U.S. reveals a “mommy war” that can’t be summed up by a staged (yes, women nurse 3-year-olds, but not one of them does it like that), intentionally provocative photograph of a middle-class woman with every parenting choice at her disposal.

And I say that, I admit, as a middle-class woman with every parenting choice at my disposal. Yes, I can attest that I received unsolicited advice about every major child-related decision I’ve made, from giving birth at home to co-sleeping to nursing my babies past their first year. And I also know that a woman who makes diametrical decisions still gets guilt and pressure for her own path. There seems to be some inherent need to question how children eat and sleep, when these are the elements of parenting that least affect anyone but the family involved. And yeah, it sucks either way. But the mere fact that we have these choices means we and our children have advantages that aren’t even imagined by a mother who cannot access pre-natal health services or afford licensed daycare.

Every Mother Counts, a global initiative to reduce maternal mortality (with one of its most vocal supporters in former Memphian Heather Armstrong of dooce.com), spent this last Mother’s Day publicizing the alarmingly precarious state of many mothers. According to World Health Organization studies cited on EMC’s website, “approximately 358,000 women die each year due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth.” That’s 1000 a day. In case that seems like a far-distant problem, keep in mind that in 2010, the United States ranked 39^th globally in maternal mortality. Thirty. Ninth.

In our city and beyond, pregnant women, new mothers, and infants are dying preventable deaths. And Time wants to stir us up about how long some people choose to breastfeed?

My mother taught me better than that.

First appeared in Main Street Journal, May 15, 2012

(c) Andria K. Brown, all rights reserved

Rock and Soul

In case you missed the Southpaw action over at Main Street Journal over the last few weeks ...
No Stopping Point Short of Victory takes a look at the conjoined legacies of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the city where he was struck down. My Modesty Proposal goes Swiftian on Tennessee's latest socio-educational policy follies.

This week's column dials down the politics but turns up the volume as I ponder the relationships and similarities between Memphis and the music it's created. I hope you'll tune in this Tuesday.

Like All Resolutions ...

A funny thing happened after I wrote my last post about not becoming a columnist.

Turns out, I became a columnist.

If you haven't seen my shameless self-promotion on Twitter and Facebook yet, you may not know that I've begun writing a bi-monthly column over at Main Street Journal, a Memphis-based daily news aggregator and, increasingly, source of original local content. Such as moi.

I began my run with a friendly little intro piece that probably sounds a bit familiar to anyone who reads this space. My next column got a bit more issue-oriented as I discussed the way women, and Southern women in particular, can and do influence the political discourse. Although I couldn't resist such a current and heated topic, I plan to keep a focus on Memphis going forward. My next piece, going up April 3, will bring things very close to home.

I'm excited for this opportunity and appreciate y'all keeping me going in this venture.

Resolved

I began 2011 with an unspoken but nonetheless determined resolution: I would write a post a week, in column-length, for one year. It was like a lazy version of a 365 project. It was a notable mission mostly because I hate the idea of New Year’s resolutions for their implied acceptance of failure. But I thought I’d buck the cliché and finish the year with a portfolio of 50 new pieces.

As a quick peek at the archives would tell you, that plan didn’t quite work out. I started strong and kept the pace going until May or so, and then petered out. In my defense, I did spend the summer focused on fiction writing, which also didn’t go quite the way I hoped. By the fall, I was struggling for motivation and when I did come up with a printable idea, I was lucky enough to have The Commercial Appeal willing to publish it. (For free, but still.) I had pieces appear in November, December and January, and I’ve gotten a larger response each month, so thanks to those of you who are reading and stopping by here for the first time.

Since nearly the beginning of my experience as a writer, I felt drawn toward non-fiction, and even more strongly pulled toward the punchy, concise format of a regular column. While my college classmates were sulking in their Salinger, I was hip-deep in collections from Mike Royko, Carl Hiassen, and Dave Barry. Just when I began thinking the column arena was a man’s, man’s, man’s world, I discovered Anna Quindlen, Maureen Dowd and Molly Ivins, who proved that being funny and feisty and questioning of power wasn’t off-limits to the ladies anymore. I pored over their work and imagined being in their places, romanticizing the constant crunch of deadlines and the grudging respect earned from those who had to admit they’d been pegged.

Since then, I’ve thought of myself as a columnist-in-waiting. And waiting. And waiting. What I haven’t been, however, is a consistently productive writer, nor an especially ambitious one. There are a lot of things I could blame for that – raising small children, writing complex technical stuff as my day job, constitutional avoidance of rejection – but when it comes down to it, I just haven’t made it a priority. And I’m finally starting to wonder why. When I think about the things that have gotten me energized and enthusiastic lately, they’ve had little to nothing to do with writing: I’ve been plotting a volunteer radio show, I’ve been designing wedding jewelry, I’ve been mastering every level of Angry Birds. I’ve been beating myself up over a lack of creative output, but in reality, I’ve just been putting my creativity out in other ways (and crushing digital pigs).

I’m not ready to admit that I’ve let go of those long-time literary goals, but for the short-term, I’ve decided to stop forcing myself toward them. If it can’t be my job right now, it has to be my hobby, and this isn’t how a hobby should go. It’s supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to be uplifting, it’s supposed to be the thing that gets me going in the morning. If that’s not what it can give me right now, it’s not worth my time. I hope it’s able to bring me joy someday soon, but until then, I’ll spend my time on the things that already do.

Setting the Standard

The standard of beauty. It’s something intelligent women are raised to acknowledge and publicly revile, although most of us chase after it just the same. Despite heaps of contrary evidence from living, breathing people, we take the word of two-dimensional images and one-dimensional portrayals of The Beautiful. I always considered the standards set in magazines or movies to be flawed, but I never stopped to think much about why. All I knew was that there were plenty of people who didn’t look like models or starlets – most of us, actually – and yet were considered attractive in one way or another.

I recently came across an article in the UK’s Daily Mail, however, that made me reframe everything I think about beauty ideals. The article was about a plus-size model who posed naked with a “standard” model to demonstrate the differences between real and idealized bodies. The photos were accompanied by facts, and the most telling one, to me, was this: More than 50% of women wear a size 14 or larger, but most retailers do not carry sizes over 14. Aside from the financial stupidity of this fact, what struck me was the plain definition of the majority. Most women are over a certain threshold, and the sizes considered appealing and attractive and marketable are under that threshold. Simply put, what we as a culture define as beautiful is the way we are not.

We all know, anecdotally, that the standard of beauty is fluid and changes over time and geography. We’re aware of Ruben’s era, when zaftig lovelies frolicked in the Vogue covers of the time and gout was considered a mark of high social status. Plumpness was a goal that represented comfort and leisure, things that most of the population rarely experienced. In the U.S, you only have to go as far back as the 1950s to see how the Depression influenced an appreciation for corn-fed glamazons like Marilyn Monroe. Likewise, some contemporary cultures in the Pacific islands still hold pageants that crown the biggest beauty. When access to food is of great value, the best food gatherers are valued. In these societies, weight meant, or means, success.

In most of the modern world, however, access to food is not an issue. Access to good, healthy, nutritious food may be, but cheap calories are rarely more than 100 yards away. So instead of worshipping the weighty, we idolize those who have the time and resources to eat well (or the self-control not to eat at all) and stay in shape. We work indoors and then watch our waists expand in the Chili’s-to-Go parking pad while the Beautiful People hire trainers and personal chefs to keep careful track of every caloric income and expense. You can never be too rich or too thin, the saying goes, and we gaze admiringly at those who’ve achieved both. They are beautiful because they represent the things we feel too weak or downtrodden to reach ourselves. They seem, quite simply, better than us.

So while I admire the efforts of Katya Zharkova to inspire women of all sizes to appreciate their beauty, I think the effort to shift the cultural standard may be wasted. I don’t think you can defeat the inherent human desire to put ourselves down. All we can do is recognize that flawed impulse and give it a little less power in our lives. Perhaps we’d be best served by just changing the name: instead of the beauty standard, perhaps we could call it the beauty myth, or the beauty delusion. We can see the beautiful as harmless anomalies, like Olympic athletes or extreme couponers, without feeling bad about ourselves for not sharing the same genetic quirks. If we can acknowledge that the pinnacle of beauty is determined by what we as a society feel is least attainable, maybe we can stop wasting so much time trying to attain it and be happy with our own standard selves.

Civic Duty

Okay, I'll admit it. When I first got the notice to report for jury duty (or, as it's handled in Shelby County, the notice to report to pick the time to report for jury duty), I groaned. After I got through the hassle of navigating flooded downtown streets at 8:15 on a weekday morning and picked a somewhat acceptable week, though, I decided I was going to shift my thinking. For better or worse, our legal system is based on conducting a trial by a jury of one's peers, and I had to ask myself: if something awful happened and I ended up in a courtroom, who would I want making major decisions about my life?

So in the spirit of judicial karma, I sat through the juror orientation session with my eyes front and my phone off, appreciating the enthusiasm and dedication of our jury commissioner. I was calmly resigned to a day of waiting around and doing nothing, so it was a pleasant surprise when I was called into jury selection about 45 minutes into the morning. (I know you're looking for the sarcasm in those last sentences, but it's really not there.)

I entered the courtroom as the 19th person in our carefully organized line. The first voir dire session lasted longer than I expected, especially since it was nearing 2:00 and we hadn't broken for lunch yet. Because we were sitting for a civil trial, the questions asked of potential jurors were focused on legal and medical knowledge, as well as general attitudes about liability and compensation. After several conferences with the judge, the attorneys dismissed four people from the pool. Some of the cuts made sense - like the lady who insisted she couldn't process anything verbally and wouldn't be able to pay attention to testimony - but others were a little more mysterious. I was surprised to see that the law office intern was sent away, but the law clerk with 30 years of experience in the city's best-known firm got to stay.

It looked like I was about to be sent back to the holding area, but after a little more questioning, another juror was excused. I was called up to fill the fourteenth spot in the box (twelve jurors plus two alternates sit through the trial), and after I answered a few questions about my education, job, and experience with car accidents, the jury was set. I was on a trial.

There was a nervous energy permeating our new group as the judge read through our instructions. Also, we were really hungry. The judge finally let us break for lunch around 2:30. When we returned to the courthouse, we were now officially allowed to enter the jury room through our own special door and our friendly courtroom deputy gave us our official juror badges. She also gave us notebooks and pens to take notes with, but we were given instructions not to read from our notes to other jurors or present them as facts of the case. Our notes were for our own memory-jogging purposes only.

I found this direction even more baffling than the admonishment not to look up anything on our own that had to do with the case – no Googling medical terms, no drive-bys of the accident site, no talking to our lawyer friends about burden of proof. It was clear that the intent of the system was for our “peer” status to be defined very narrowly and literally. We were to approach the case with our own personal knowledge and nothing more, and could present nothing to other jurors other than our own interpretations and opinions of what occurred within the framework of the trial. 

By the time we all got resettled in the courtroom, there was only enough time for the attorneys to give their opening statements and the judge to give us instructions for the next day. When we reconvened in the jury room the following morning, there were already the beginnings of that camp-week familiarity that forms between people in short-term, close-knit situations. The deputy learned all of our names, which meant we all learned each others’. We lined up in the same order each time we entered or exited the courtroom, so we knew our line buddies and who was missing.

The trial itself was fairly uneventful: a civil suit between participants in a minor car accident in which the plaintiff said she incurred a major injury. The testimony consisted of each driver giving a side of the story, pre-transcribed depositions from doctors that the plaintiff’s attorney read out loud for two hours, and an account from the traffic officer who was at the scene of the accident. We were shown photographs of each car and copies of the plaintiff’s medical records. In all, it took no more than five hours. By 3:30 or so, we heard the closing statements and went back to our secret hideout to deliberate. Well, twelve of us did. Right before we were excused, two numbers were randomly pulled from our group to remove the alternate jurors. I panicked for a minute, thinking how disappointed I’d be to sit through the whole trial and then not be able to decide on it, but I stayed in the group.

The case wasn’t clear-cut, and although I had a strong leaning toward one side, I expected the other jurors to be mixed in their opinions. I was somewhat shocked, then, when our first pre-discussion vote came up 11-1 in the defendant’s favor. I guess everyone else had gotten the same impression that the plaintiff’s injuries were real, but she just hadn’t made the case that a tiny fender-not-even-bender had caused them. And as I pointed out in my Perry Mason moment, the only photograph she had of her car’s “damage” was taken at least six months after the accident. Or about 90 days after her surgery. Or about the same time those final notice bills start coming in. Call me cynical, or just call me a peer who has had my fair share of co-insurance responsibility, but it didn’t do much for her credibility.

As we discussed and re-voted and discussed some more, there was still one person who remained unsure, or at least not the 51% sure we were assigned to be (“beyond a reasonable doubt” doesn’t apply in civil cases). It was nearing 5:00 and impatience was settling into the room. Arguments were getting a little louder and more exasperated. At that point, we were at a stalemate, and I humbly credit my experience in living in a household of nine people with getting us out of it. The holdout was a woman in the medical profession who thought the timing of the accident and the injury were too close together to be coincidental. Arguing that such a thing was unlikely but possible didn’t change her mind. So I said yes, you’re right, let’s say they’re connected. But what if it’s not in the way it seems? What if there’s another explanation? When we talked through other options and she could see alternate possibilities, she was able to agree, without reservation, that the plaintiff hadn’t proven her claim.

We were all excited and glad to have come to agreement, but then a somber feeling came over us, too.  I don’t think I was the only juror who thought that a civil trial would be sort of boring and inconsequential, and from what I heard in the jury room, I know I wasn’t the only one surprised by how high-stakes the case ended up feeling. Although the issue at hand seemed pretty minor, the amount of money involved was significant. Whatever decision we made was going to have a huge impact on both of those people.   

When the forewoman read our decision, the trial participants all seemed unmoved, except for the defendant who was beaming with relief. I got the sense that the judge approved, but maybe she just makes a habit of looking passively accepting. The attorneys thanked us and offered to speak with us afterward if we had anything we wanted to share with them, and although it was tempting to point out to them the car photo detail they’d both missed, I turned in my juror badge and went on my way, my week of jury duty wrapped up in two days, my civic responsibility fulfilled for ten more years.

As we were getting back to our cars, several of the other jurors said that they were surprised how stressful the experience had been, and how glad they were it hadn’t been a more difficult case. I completely agreed, but I still would have wanted to serve, and I'll be willing to serve again. It’s unlikely I would have a lengthy encounter with either of the parties in that trial, but our judicial system is more open in its definition of peers. As residents of Shelby County, we are all considered peers because we are members of the same community, and as such, what happens to one of us is relevant to us all. I’m still not certain it’s the most fair or wise or accurate course of action, but you have to admit it’s a beautiful idea.