No Child Left Behind

No Child Left Behind

No, I'm not talking about the legislative act passed in 2001 and now up for renewal in 2008-- at least not right away.

Instead, I want to describe a seemingly ordinary school that accomplishes extraordinary things. It's a school where children talk about peace-making with no trace of self-consciousness and come up with their own ideas about how to address the needs of their community.

The results show all over town: After Hurricane Katrina, students at the Cottonwood School raised six thousand dollars for Watermelon Ranch, a local shelter that had taken in over 500 animals rescued from the floods, and helped them build a new clinic. There are books in the children's wing at the local hospital because of read-a-thons, talent shows and other student-inspired fund-raisers.

The Cottonwood School is a set in a small group of buildings, one of which was once a greenhouse and now serves as the “multi-purpose” room for assemblies, plays, drama, and a set of steel drums. Other classrooms are in “cottages” - small converted houses that give children and teachers a sense of being at home, even when they are at school.

Environmental education plays as much of a role in what these children learn as reading, math, art, and music. They help tend the school's gardens, feed and care for the chickens, and take walks down to the Rio Grande, where they might find themselves trying to build a raft or participating in a census of the porcupine population.

Every Friday, the whole school gathers for an assembly and sing-a-long, in which parents are always invited to participate. Everyone salutes those with birthdays with the song - “I wish you a happy birthday, a joyous and celebrated birthday.” The spirit is infectious; it's impossible to leave one of these gatherings without a smile on your face.

But what struck me most this about the unique qualities of this school was the day I dropped in on a “reading” day to bring a bag of clementines for a snack and found a completely silent classroom. Soup was cooking in the kitchen, and a warm delicious small permeated the cottage.

And in every nook and cranny of the house, children were spread out on blankets, lying on pillows or with knees drawn up, reading a favorite book. Their teacher sat in a rocking chair engaged in the same activity. I have rarely felt such a sense of peace as I did entering the classroom that day, watching children so utterly absorbed in their own private imaginary worlds that they didn't even realize I was there.

So now to the proposed reauthorization of the “No Child Left Behind” Act. I have no quarrel with the Act's intention to hold schools accountable for what they are actually teaching the children entrusted to their care. But test scores are only one measure of how learning takes place, and not a very good one, especially if these scores are not placed in the context of other assessments.

The deficiencies of the NCLB Act are many, especially the failure of the federal government to provide sufficient funds to cover the cost of testing. But testing itself is a practice that should be discussed and debated in our communities. If we test a new group of second graders every year, we are losing the opportunity to measure the progress of a single cohort of students. Moreover, that cohort could be assessed every two to three years without any lose of important data. We could measure the same students in 3^rd grade, in 6^th grade, and in 9^th, and have a very good idea of how those children had progressed in acquiring basic math and reading skills. There is no justifiable reason to put children through a week of testing and months of test preparation on an annual basis when it gives no more useful data than less frequent testing of the same cohort of students.

There is also a price to be paid in the annual test ritual in terms of the toll it takes on students and teachers. Teachers who are forced to spend their days “teaching to the test” lose their autonomy and their sense of professionalism. Many schools have sacrificed the important subject areas of art, music, and the physical education of children in order to spend time increasing math and reading scores. In the meantime, children spend more and more hours in the classroom, and less and less time outside playing, exploring, reading for pleasure, and just being kids.

There is nothing wrong with the goal of leaving “no child behind,” of trying to ensure that every child makes through the public school system able to read, write, and communicate on a basic level. But there are better ways to achieve this goal than simply testing kids year after year, and there are better ways to assess the effectiveness of a school than evaluating it solely based on test scores.

It is time for voters and legislators to hold the NCLB Act itself accountable and to ask hard questions about where it has been effective and where it has fallen short. Surely the Department of Education can find ways to include the teaching of the arts and environmental science, physical education, and the participation of parents and community in its evaluation of individual schools, and give schools credit for providing a broader and more diverse curriculum than any standardized test can measure. We can also treat our teachers as professionals and give them the autonomy to teach their students in ways that they feel will best educate them as opposed to teaching simply to raise their test scores.

As the requirements of the NCLB become more stringent over time, they also confront parents and teachers with increasingly difficult choices. Parents who disagreed with the premise of the Act used to be able to write a letter requesting that their students be excused from testing. But now, a shortfall in the number of students taking the test in any grade or in any ethnic/racial category can put a school's share of federal funding at risk. Similarly, if a school fails to measure up even in one area, it can be labeled a “failing” school. This is pushing accountability into the realm of the punitive and is one reason that many parents are beginning to question the value of a public school education that is so narrowly constrained and measured.

For me, the Cottonwood School with its independent outlook on education and its deep respect for its teachers, students, and parents offers a little bit of utopia in the educational landscape. But think what it might be like if every teacher in America had the time and freedom to take their students for a walk in the woods or give them an afternoon to read a favorite book in silence and peace. It's a vision worth contemplating.

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

This past week as I was driving I found myself listening to a recording of Dr. Martin Luther King's final speech, the one he gave in Memphis the night before he was assassinated.

Towards the end of the speech, I was struck by his use of the story of the Good Samaritan, which he presented as a parable of a man reaching across racial lines. He described the Samaritan as “a man of another race [who] came by [and who] decided not to be compassionate by proxy. [Instead] he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying that this was the good man; this was the great man because he had the capacity to project the “I” into the “thine,” to be concerned about his brother,” even if that brother was a man of a different race.

At the very end of the speech, Dr. King told a cheering crowd: “ I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”

The very fact that today in 2008 we have a white woman and a black man running serious campaigns for President suggests that we are a good deal closer to the “Promised Land” of racial and gender equality that Dr. King evoked. We may even have a chance of hearing the shattering sound of one or another glass ceiling in November if we elect the first black or the first female president of the United States.

However, the emergence of race and gender as weapons to be used directly and by proxy in both the Clinton and Obama campaigns raises disturbing questions about their effects on voters. Not just black female voters who may feel deeply torn between their allegiances to the advancement of women and to the advancement of all people of color, but all voters who are excited by the prospect of having such strong candidates to choose from, and yet dismayed by the inevitable political tendency to go negative.

When the Clinton and Obama campaigns take their jabs at one another, I can't help thinking of the Old Testament tales of sibling rivalry that so often ended in disaster – Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. It's clear that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama deeply and even desperately want to win the nomination of the Democratic party, but it may be time for the party leadership to suggest that each risks alienating voters that may be vital to Democratic success if they try to destroy each other's reputation in the primaries.

One thing is certain: whether Clinton or Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, that nominee will face a tidal wave of mud-slinging across the airwaves that is likely to make the Swift Boat attacks look like a school-yard scuffle. There is no need for either of them to give this opposition more ammunition in advance.

Since Clinton and Obama are both self-proclaimed Christians, I'd suggest that they consider another Gospel parable, that of the woman taken in adultery. Not that I'm suggesting that either of them is guilty of the sin in question, but they might want to take Christ's advice to heart when he answered the scribes and the Pharisees: “Let anyone among us who is without sin be the first to throw a stone” (John 8:7).

Dr. King responded to death threats by saying that he had been to the mountain and seen the Promised Land, and he died prophesying that all of us as a people would get there. In 2008 the Democratic party has its best chance in years to help achieve Dr. King's vision if its candidates can keep their eyes on the prize and not get bogged down in the political mud.

Voter ID - A Solution without a Problem

Voter ID – A Solution without A Problem

In recent years many states have passed new “voter ID” laws to combat the problem of election fraud. The problem is that voter fraud doesn't exist, at least not in the form of people showing up to vote who aren't who they say they are.

In fact, a federally mandated report on election fraud found that there is no evidence of in-person fraud at the polling place because, as a Republican consultant put it: “Who's going to take the risk of going to jail on something so blatant that maybe changes one vote?”

Instead, the election fraud that has taken place is systematic: it involves the manipulation of registration lists, the disappearance or the stuffing of ballot boxes, absentee ballots filed on behalf of dead people, and the now infamous problems with computer voting machines.

So why are states passing increasingly restrictive voter ID laws instead of taking measures to address election fraud that really does exist and is verifiable? It is a question voters everywhere should be asking of their state representatives and their election officials.

The attorney general for Indiana, who is defending the most restrictive law in the nation in front of the Supreme Court this month, can only make the feeble assertion that the law's effect is mostly “preventative.”

“Preventative.” The logic is mind-boggling. The state of Indiana is making everyone get a government-issued photo ID to prevent a crime that its highest-ranking law enforcement official acknowledges does not exist.

You could just enjoy the irony of the situation if it were not for the fact that Indiana's voter ID law and other laws like it are having a negative effect on one of our most fundamental rights as citizens –the right to vote.

For the past three centuries, our country has moved progressively towards the expansion of the right to vote, beginning with the abolition of property requirements, then racial, gender, and age restrictions.

So why in the twenty-first century are we suddenly reversing course and making it harder for people to vote? Are politicians really concerned about voter fraud? Or do they fear the impact of the rising numbers of voters who began participating in the electoral process when some states made it easier for people to register to vote.

With the margin of victory in the last two presidential elections so narrow, and the 2008 election already hotly contested in both parties, the stakes continue to grow for both political parties. And that makes it more likely that “Voter ID” will become another partisan wedge issue as Republicans try to stir up fears among their supporters about alleged voter fraud, and Democrats fight against these restrictions fearing vote suppression among groups likely to vote for their party.

In the meantime, Voter ID laws make it harder for the poor, the elderly, and minorities to vote because many people in these categories don't drive, and many have limited time and means to get the necessary photo ID.

There are solutions that could at least begin to address these problems. Laws could be modified to exempt those over the age of 60 or those claiming indigence. The state could sponsor free voter ID sign-ups on special dates at social security offices, or public libraries, and encourage civic groups to help those with limited mobility to reach these outreach sites.

But fundamentally as a society we should be asking: What is at stake in making it more difficult for any citizen to vote?

At every stage when the right to vote was extended to a new group--men without property, blacks, women, the young--conservatives made dire predictions about how this would destroy the democratic process because they argued that members of these groups were not as capable of exercising the right to vote judiciously. More importantly, they feared that these newly-enfranchised groups would vote against the interests of those who already enjoyed that privilege.

Those same fears are operating today in our democracy where the specter of individual voter fraud is raised, not to improve the security of the electoral process, but to restrict access to it. The real dangers to the electoral process reside in the abuses of partisan officials who oversee state elections and who systematically try to rig the system in favor of their political party.

That is the kind of election abuse that should concern all citizens, even as we advocate to once again guarantee the right to vote to all U.S. Citizens without undue restrictions, and amend voter ID laws to encourage the vote and not to suppress it.

Some Things Never Change

Some Things Never Change

The other night I took my son out to a local cafe to buy him dessert and thank him for accompanying me to a poetry reading in a part of town I didn't know very well and didn't want to go into at night alone.

We were talking about his MySpace page, and I was struck by the differences in some of the photos he and his male friends put up. The boys posted images of themselves skateboarding, leaping off things, or eating voraciously and with abandon. By contrast, the photos of the girls all fit the same formula – each of them seemed to be trying to exude the essence of sultriness as defined by Hollywood, fashion magazines, and celebrity websites.

“They all look pretty but exactly the same,” I told him. He looked at me pityingly and replied: “That's because they take about a hundred photos of themselves before they find one they're willing to put up.”

Suddenly I felt myself taken back to my own adolescence – the tyranny of other girls commenting on what I wore, what fashionable items of clothing I didn't own because I couldn't afford them, and who I should hang out with. Girls, some of them my close friends, for God's sake, were the ones who noticed and pointed out every pimple, every fashion faux pas, every hair out of place,

Even when I reached college, I still remember the shock of how much I angered my freshman roommates when one evening we went down to the dining hall, and I decided, on the spur of the moment, to sit with some other people. They were furious with me, and that moment of rupture signaled the beginning of the end of my friendship with women, who seemed to me to still be caught up in the controlling social dynamics of high school.

In college I discovered feminism and found words to describe the frustrations with gender stereotypes that I had felt ever since I was a little girl. Later, in graduate school, I met gifted, generous women, who hardly ever wore make-up, were smart, and looked beautiful because they didn't give a damn about living up to some single cultural stereotype of feminine beauty.

So I felt both sad and angry when I saw those images on my son's MySpace page. Here was a group of young women who seemed trapped in the most entrenched stereotypes of femininity, like butterflies fixed with pins on a collector's board. Where was the spontaneity, the sense of fun, even the silliness I saw in the photos of my son and his friends? Why did they find it necessary to give up all the vestiges of childhood so soon? And for what? An air-brushed, stiff, fashion-magazine version of what it means to be a woman? A sexiness so put on it seemed like a caricature of any real expression of sexual desire?

We tend to blame our culture, and in particular the media, for inundating young women with images they can't possibly live up to. But the “beauty trap” women find themselves in is more complicated. Women are not simply “victims” of consumer culture. Girls themselves enforce the “beauty trap” because of the peer pressure that seems to be an inevitable part of their psycho-sexual development.

We see a similar, although much more horrific dynamic, in cultural rituals like female circumcision, where older women and even female relatives can be as active in perpetuating this act of mutilation as the men in these societies. We condemn those practices as barbaric form of child abuse, even if we also recognize that in societies where women are so dependent on men for survival, none of the women involved seem to have much choice in the matter. But whenever and wherever women work in concert to enforce conformity upon other women, it can be just as damaging as when men openly abuse women, and often far more insidious.

So having emerged from some of the painful feminine rituals of adolescence, with my self-confidence mostly intact, I cannot help but ask myself: What should I do when I confront evidence that the same thing is happening to women young enough to be my daughter?

Do I dismiss it as “just a phase”? A rite of passage? A temporary bit of role-playing that girls engage in before they find their own individual expressions of beauty and sexuality?

I'd like to believe that, but I don't.

I look back on photos (and there are very few of them; I saw to that) of myself as an adolescent girl and then a young woman in my twenties. When I see them, I feel both nostalgia and a strange sense of sadness that I experienced so much of the same self-doubt that adolescent women continue to experience more than twenty years later. The comments of other girls and my own internal self-critique (I'm too fat; too short; too this; too that) mar the pleasure I should have taken in just being young and beautiful in my own way.

So when I look at my adolescent sons who are clinging to childhood for all its worth and enjoying being children as well as young men, my heart goes out to young women, who are so caught up in how they are seen, that they give up the spontaneity and freedom of childhood much too soon, just in order to “fit in” with the other girls -peers who can be a source of support, but just as easily the ones who cut most deeply and painfully into their self-esteem and their sense of autonomy.

How the post-feminist age addresses that problem and how it might give girls the courage to just be themselves and not some distorted image of conventional beauty is a question that remains open. The “beauty trap” remains just as entrenched in our culture and in our psyches as ever.

But one thing women of my generation can do is to keep reaching out to girls--our daughters, our students, our patients, our neighbors' kids--listening to them and demonstrating that they do have a support system to counter the pressure to “fit in” that they feel from our media culture and most of all from other girls.

Me and My Shadow

Me and My Shadow

I always loved the song, “Me and My Shadow” especially the chorus.

“Me and my shadow/Strolling down the avenue/Me and my shadow/Not another soul to tell our troubles to.”

But I never realized how apt its lyrics would be for me until I adopted a poodle last May.

One of the hardest things about giving up my full-time job and spending much more time at home, especially in a new town, was the sense of isolation and loneliness. I think that one of the reasons it's taken me two years to seriously sit down and start writing like this is that I felt so alone spending hours in a big, empty house.

If I had sat down in front of a computer screen, I think the only thing I could have written were the words pounding in my head: “Get me out of here! I want to go home!”

So Diana's arrival was fortuitous for me in ways I hadn't anticipated. I confess I've always been subconsciously aware of my destiny as a “dog person.” Many of my earliest childhood memories involve the family dog, and especially the dog and my dad. It's hard for me to imagine my dad without a dog at his side-- reading his Bible in the early hours of the morning--reading the newspaper in the evening in his favorite chair. Dad driving me to school with a dog sticking his nose out the window to catch the breeze.

I always knew that it was just a matter of time before I succumbed to the family destiny and brought home a dog.

Yet I managed to resist the compulsion for years. There were so many reasons not to have a dog: writing a dissertation, my husband's aversion to small “yap-yap” dogs who always seemed to love him when he simply wanted to “punt them across the room,” my full-time job, a move across country, a major remodel.

And yet there finally arrived a moment when I'd run out of excuses. I'd promised my boys a dog, and now I had no more reasons not to fulfill my pledge.

So last April my husband and I dutifully went to PetSmart during a city-wide adopt-a-thon, certain that we could just look around, while still keeping our options open. After all, we both had allergies, so we had limited our choice of breeds to poodles, Portuguese Water Dogs, and any other dog with hair, not fur.

But as fate would have it, there was a poodle among the plethora of pit bulls and German Shepherd mixes. An elderly gentleman who had just put his wife in a nursing home had given up their three small dogs, including one very frightened miniature poodle. One of the volunteers told us this sad tale, including the detail of the elderly gentleman sitting in his car and crying for half an hour, before he finally left his dogs for the last time.

My husband picked up the poodle in his arms and asked me, “What do you think?”

“What do I think?” I wondered silently. “You, the small-dog-hater, are sitting there with a trembling poodle in your arms, and you wonder what I think? If you like this dog as much as I suspect you do, then this is the dog for us.” So aloud I said, “Why not?” and suddenly we were dog-owners, the proud new adoptive parents of a miniature poodle, apricot in color, with one slightly protruding tooth that makes her look as if she has a single fang.

We took our poodle home, and immediately discovered that my husband had acquired a shadow, and if he wasn't there, so had I.

It was so funny watching this little dog follow my husband's every move, that the kids and I burst out laughing. Every time he got up to go to the kitchen, the bathroom, the front door, he was always followed by the distinctive clip-clip of her toenails on the brick floors.

But for me, having my little shadow, was something even more special. I now had a comforting presence in the house, a companion, someone to talk to on our walks along the irrigation banks and down to the river. “Me and my Shadow,” is a song about the blues, but for me, it feels like a song about keeping the blues at bay, as long as I have my poodle at my side.

Civil Unions - For All of Us

Civil Unions – For all of Us

The political landscape on giving gay couples the same rights as heterosexual married couples is starting to shift. More Americans and more politicians are lining up behind the idea of “civil unions” as an alternative to “marriage.” This month New Hampshire became the fourth state to legalize civil unions, and other states, like New Mexico, will soon debate the issue in their legislative sessions.

For some gay activists, the idea of a “civil union” seems like a cop-out, offering them second-class citizenship instead of the full rights of married heterosexual couples. Others feel that only this incremental approach will be enough to overcome the nearly fifty percent of the public that remains opposed to any form of union between homosexuals.

I well remember the first time I was married; it was very early on a cold March day on Long Island when my fiance and I showed up at the house of a local justice of the peace. We were greeted by his wife, still wearing her bathrobe and slippers. The only thing missing were the hairnet and curlers. The justice himself chain-smoked through the whole process, and I can't say it was a particularly moving event in my life. It was a civil ceremony, short and to the point, and we did it precisely for all the reasons that gay couples want civil unions: taxes, health benefits, inheritance, the right to advocate for an incapacitated partner.

A few months later I married the same man in a religious ceremony presided over by a Lutheran minister and a Catholic priest. It was a beautiful ritual, held in front of family and friends, to affirm our love and our promise to spend the rest of our lives with one another. It had no legal effect whatsoever, but it did give us an event to remember and celebrate for many years to come.

So why shouldn't all of us consider the possibility of separating “marriage” with all of its trappings of religion and ritual from the legal institution of a “civil union”? If the state were to offer everyone “civil unions,” based on nothing less than the legal privileges now accorded to married persons, we could create a completely level playing field between gay and heterosexual couples. We could call ourselves “cued” (“civil unioned”) on IRS and census forms and “married” at social events like Back-to-School-Night and office parties.

If everyone were “cued,” the whole alleged attack on “marriage” by gay couples would become a moot point, at least in political terms. People could still order flowers, buy gowns and tuxedos, and affirm their unions in the church, temple, mosque, or synagogue of their choice. These events just wouldn't have any legal status. They would be private celebrations of love between two people in front of friends and family.

I've been happily married for over twenty years, but I'd just as happily commemorate my next anniversary as a “civil union” if that change in legal status meant that other couples, particularly gay couples, could have the same privileges and responsibilities that I've enjoyed for so many years with the man I love. Wouldn't that be something to celebrate?

Maternity and Menopause

Maternity and Menopause

I'm fairly certain that I'm going through menopause. If waking up sweating in the middle of the night is a sure symptom, then there is no question but that I'm experiencing a major physiological change.

What the “change” means for me is still an open question. I'm only in my mid-forties so facing up to the fact that I might be losing my last opportunity to reproduce is not something I'd expected to confront quite so soon.

I know that I'm perfectly content with the size of my family, and the thought of having a baby at this stage of my life is not one that excites me or brings maternal feelings to the fore. I always wanted a daughter for many reasons, but I have three wonderful sons, and I am not bewailing my lot.

But losing that capacity to have a baby is something else entirely. What if one of my children were killed or came down with a life-threatening disease? Wouldn't I want another child, especially if that child were able to offer a life-saving bone-marrow transplant? These are the paranoid fantasies that play out in my head lately, especially at 3:00 a.m. when I've already woken up in a cold sweat and can't get back to sleep.

But the thought of menopause also brings to mind other possibilities. Having spent nearly twenty years in the highly productive but very energy-draining activity of mothering, can I now begin to think about my abilities to create in a new light?

I find myself thinking of those Renaissance writers like Sidney, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, all of whom used the metaphor of parenting to describe the experience of writing. Cervantes, in one of the most memorable prologues to a novel, wrote in his preface to Don Quixote:

Idle reader: Without my swearing to it, you can believe that I would like this book, the child of my understanding to be the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most discreet that anyone could imagine. But I have not been able to contravene the natural order; in it, like begets like. And so what could my barren and poorly cultivated wits beget but the history of a child who is dry, withered, capricious, and filled with inconstant thoughts never imagined by anyone else, which is just what one would expect of a person begotten in a prison, where every discomfort has its place and everyone mournful sound makes its home.

Despite the fact that I am not writing this blog from a cell, I find Cervantes' words more and more resonant with my own experience. Just as I wanted my biological children to be the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most discreet, I have had to come to terms with the fact that they are not my imagined projections of genius, but their own idiosyncratic selves, creative and surprising in ways I never anticipated, but frustrating and even disappointing in rarely meeting my own narcissistic fantasies of what they might have been. Yet I still want to put the blindfold over my eyes and imagine that each of them will still conform to my parental fantasies of what their individual success might look like.

But now that my task of biological mothering is drawing to a close, I am taking on a new creative project, with the same heady and yet frightening sense of launching something I can't anticipate or entirely control.

The challenge so far has not been writer's block, but rather the question of how to discipline, contain and shape all the ideas that are raging in my brain, particularly in the wee hours of the morning when I find myself writing the next blog instead of getting sleep. Again I think of Sidney worrying that he is tying himself in knots trying to tell his Stella how much he loves her:

But words came halting forth, wanting Invention' stay;
Invention, Nature's child, fled stepdame Study's blows;
And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way,
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
'Fool,' said my Muse to me, 'look in thy heart, and write!'

Fearing to produce a "dried up, withered offspring," I nonetheless take Sidney's words to heart and hope that my fears will be belied by the creation of a lively and surprising discourse as I move from being the mother of sons to being mother of words.

Hillary's Tears

Hillary's Tears

The media has practically run amok analyzing Hillary Clinton's “emotional” moment captured on video and now playing at an Internet site near you. What did it mean? Was it scripted or spontaneous? Did it really have an effect on the upset of the polling projections in last Tuesday's New Hampshire primary? What does it say about women voters?

I think that what viewers, and by extension, voters, saw in Hillary's response to the inquiry: “How do you do it?” says more about us than it does about her.

We're not mind-readers, and we'll never know for sure how much of her response was sincere and how much was performative, the self-conscious reaction of a seasoned politician who has learned that she is always “on” whenever she presents herself to the public.

As gendered human beings, we always respond to some degree, in “scripted” ways to certain situations because we learn from infancy that the world sees us as “male” and “female” and automatically sets up certain expectations that frame how we behave and also how our words, gestures, and body language are perceived by others.

So in some ways, it doesn't matter so much what Hillary's “emotional moment” meant to her as what it meant to us and what it reveals about our own individual expectations of who she “really” is.

Rush Limbaugh predictably mocked Clinton, calling it her “waa-waa” moment, thus demonstrating his own bullying instincts and the schoolyard vulgarity that characterizes his Clinton shtick and makes “right-wing” and “rudeness” nearly synonymous among talk radio ranters of his ilk.

Katha Pollitt, veteran feminist in the trenches, saw the immediate stereotype of female weakness and noted that the video raised “the oldest dumbest canard about women: they're too emotional to hold power.” For her Hillary was not so much an individual woman, as a symbol of the double standards women still must confront in public life.

Most ordinary folks, without an ax to grind, saw Hillary's tears in terms of their already established expectations about her: “If she is breaking down now, how would she act under pressure as president?” grumbled one 52-year-old male on nytimes.com. Women could be equally harsh, as a 46-year-old female accountant demonstrated when she complained of Clinton's subsequent comment that “Some of us are right, some of us are wrong.” “This is exactly what is wrong with her campaign,” she wrote. “As long as she continues the 'I am right and you are wrong' mantra, there will be no collaboration, no cohesiveness, no unit.” One can fairly assume that neither of them were Clinton supporters to begin with.

But evidently, many other women, saw themselves in that moment of vulnerability: Those of us who call ourselves “feminists” and don't see it as the “F-word." Younger women who caught in Clinton's weariness the exhaustion of all the women before them who fought so hard just so a woman could run for President and not have her campaign seen as a joke. Women who were fed up with one moment of vulnerability being blown so out of proportion.

Primary season in a national election is not all the different from courting season. We project our deepest desires, fears, and aspirations onto individuals that we can never really know on a personal level and then interpret their behavior in terms of our pre-existing ideas about who they really are: white/black, male/female, Democrat/Republican, wife/husband, mother/father etc.

Any female candidate faces a double burden of conflicting and deep-seated cultural expectations about who she should be as a leader and as a woman. We expect her to be strong, but not too strong, vulnerable, but not weak. It's an exhausting balancing act for all professional women, and we hear women's awareness of that tension in the self-conscious laughter that arose immediately when another woman asked Hillary Clinton: “How do you do it?” It's a question that many women, struggling to balance children and career or the needs of a spouse or partner with their own individual aspirations, ask themselves all the time.

Maureen Dowd wrote in her New York Times op-ed that “in a weirdly narcissistic way, [Hillary] was crying for us” and for the country's failure “to grasp how much it needs her.”

I saw it differently, and like many of the women who witnessed her response to a crucial question – how do you do it ?– I believe many women saw themselves in that moment of vulnerability.

For women, Hillary's tears, welling but not shed, were those tears many women find welling up in such moments of fatigue and vulnerability when we reflect on just how hard it is for us to manage the juggling act that our society demands of us and that it often judges so harshly when we enter public life.

So before we ask ourselves what Hillary's tears meant for the voters of the New Hampshire primary, perhaps we might also ask ourselves what those tears meant for us as well. It could be revealing.

Good-bye Plastic!

Good-bye Plastic!

After 30 or so years of trying to make New Year's resolutions I never keep, I'm limiting myself to one small incremental change for 2008. My husband always jokes that the key to success is low expectations. My mantra is “Let yourself off the hook for the moment but not for the long run.” I may slip up for a day or two, but I've promised myself that won't be an excuse for abandoning my little resolution altogether.

So here's my small contribution to reducing global warming: I'm giving up plastic--not the Visa or Mastercard kind--but the ubiquitous bags you find at every chain store, the coffee lids I get at Starbucks, and especially, the disposable water bottle.

It hasn't been hard to get started. I had two canvas bags from a Palo Alto, California, Recycling initiative, and I've acquired the rest from grocery chains. If I forget my canvas bags, I just buy another one. I have a collection now from Whole Foods, Albertson's, and Sunflower Market, enough to always have a few in the trunk of my car. At first, I got strange looks from the brand-name grocery store clerks and even a few sighs when they had to take out items they'd already started stuffing in plastic bags because I pointed out that I'd brought my own.

But two days ago, I noticed that the clerk was putting groceries into another woman's Whole Foods bag and that between us was another customer requesting plastic but looking with curiosity at these two “bring-your-own-baggers.” I was no longer a minority in the checkout line!

My eight-year-old son started the water bottle boycott at his elementary school after listening to an NPR piece on the waste produced by the popular bottled water industry – 4 billion gallons were sold in individual containers in 2006 in the U.S. Alone, and nearly a third of those end up in the trash. So we bought reusable bottles, a Brita filter, and started drinking filtered tap water.

Today I walked up to my local gym, and two guys were handing out bottles of water as a promotion for their company. “No thanks,” I said. “I brought my own. I'm reducing my carbon footprint by not using disposable water bottles. Yes, they both looked at me as if I were crazy.

But think about it. It's not that easy to reduce your driving by more than a few miles a week, and buying a Prius is beyond most people's means. But plastic is produced from natural gas and petroleum, and plastic is also something that I can easily choose not to consume. That may not mean a great deal for one person who on average consumes 28 gallons of bottled water a year. But if more of us kicked the bottled water habit, we'd not only make a collective dent in our dependency on foreign oil, we'd also save $11 billion a year. For that cost savings, we could each get ourselves a decent bottle of champagne to celebrate.

For grocery stores and big-chains like Target and Wal-Mart, this is a great opportunity to brand your green credentials by putting your logo on a canvas bag and selling it to your customers. And consumers, please buy those bags and then don't leave home without one.

Why me?

"Why me?" is a question I usually ask myself when I'm thoroughly exasperated at being a 40-something mother in an otherwise male household of deliberate incompetents. "Where are my shoes? cell phone? jeans? favorite shirt? receipt for that faucet that stopped working etc?" they cry. Having just sat down for a moment's peace, I usually holler back across the house: "Try your closet, front hall table, drawer, laundry room, filing cabinet etc." only to hear the inevitable "I can't find it" and wonder as I get up from my comfortable perch: "Was this what I spent four years in college and another seven in graduate school for?
To become Chief-Finder-of-All-Things-Otherwise-Intelligent-Males-Can't-Find?"

Now I'm asking "Why me?" in a completely different and refreshingly individual sense. I've been part of a collective called the D-W Family for over twenty years, and it's been too long since I took the time to think about things just from the perspective of Beth --not R's wife or N's mom. Sure the experience of those identities has shaped who I am as an individual ,and I'm certainly not going to follow the example of Meryl Streep in her role as Ms. Kramer and abandon my family in a mid-life crisis quest to find myself.

I know who I am as part of this family I love and cherish, but I want to filter out those everyday interruptions of family life to think a little more deeply about who I will be when my role as mother in residence is over and I've sent my little ducklings to make their own way in the wide world.

"Why me?" is also a question that springs to mind, painfully I admit, when I consider the hubris of adding one more middle-class, overeducated, white mom's musings to the thousands of blogs that are printed every day, only to vanish into the ether without a trace of a reader's response. At least in the internet age I don't have worry about today's print being used to wrap up tomorrow's fish, something the Latin poet Catullus used to imagine as the most ignominious fate for a writer.

In fact, my words could come back to haunt me if I'm ever in the position of having political hacks dig up my kindergarten musings on my presidential aspirations. (Sorry folks. I went to school in the un-liberated Midwest and at age five I just wanted to grow up to be an actress or a school teacher. ) But I hope my words do haunt me in the sense of coming back to me months, years, or even decades from now when I look back and wonder: "Good Lord! What was I thinking?"

A Modest Proposal for Voters in 2008

Now that the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary have gotten the election race off to an exciting start, here's a modest proposal I'm offering to voters, including myself, on a few ways to keep your emotions in check and cast your ballot using your brain as well as your heart.

• Don't follow the election as if it were a horse race. This is what the media does, especially on 24-hour news outlets like CNN and Fox. It's really easy to want to bet on a “winner” based on what all the pundits and polls are telling you, but remember, the “prize” in this case isn't money, it's your future and the future of your country. Good negotiators always walk out of the car dealership and sleep on it before they plunk down their hard-earned cash on a good-looking car. In elections, just turn off the TV and ignore the polls for at least 24 hours before you cast your vote for the candidate that looked best to you, and you're less likely to suffer “buyer's” remorse.

• Don't vote for the “nice guy.” Remember the current occupant of the White House. He was portrayed as a “nice guy,” a guy “you'd want to have a beer with,” a guy who wasn't a “Washington insider.” He was also the same guy who thought the U.S. Shouldn't be the world's policeman. A “nice guy” (male or female) is someone you invite to a barbeque, not someone you want to put into the White House. Sure, no wants a sociopath in there either, but surely the leader of the free world should have something a little stronger going in the credentials department than just being “nice.”

• Take campaign promises with a large grain of salt. Politicians on the election trail are consummate sales people. They tailor their message to the local audience and tell you what you want to hear in the vaguest terms possible. That's why undefined but optimistic terms like “hope,” “values,” and “change” are so popular. They sound good to everyone and if delivered with just the right touch of sincerity and some stirring background music, they might just make you overlook their plausible deniability. A better measure of what a candidate might do in office is to look at their past record and place that record in the context of the challenges and crisis each one faced during their political careers. If you can find an in-depth profile written by a journalist who followed the candidates back in the statehouse or congressional district they represent, all the better.

• Follow the money. Since the Supreme Court ruled that money equals free speech, democracy in this country has been awash in the campaign contributions of special interests, and the candidates have their hands out to accept, no matter how much they decry the role of money in elections. This isn't necessarily all the candidates' fault. Campaigns are absurdly expensive, and as the late Molly Ivins used to quip, “You got to dance with them what brung ya.” But paying attention to those who are giving money to the candidates is effort well spent. On January 8^th, 2008, Democracy Now ran a great piece on who has contributed to the $420 million candidates have already raised (and that's running at twice the rate of fundraising from the last election). (http://www.democracynow.org/).

• Use your TiVo or the low-tech alternative, the mute button, whenever a campaign ad comes on your screen. These ads are a pure exercise in emotional manipulation from the imagery to the patriotic music that underscores the inevitable flag in the background. Turning off the sound at least allows you analyze the message, and if you're smart, you'll follow up with a trip to FactCheck.org, a non-partisan site operating under the aegis of the Annenberg Foundation (http://www.factcheck.org/.

• Don't get discouraged, disgusted, or disaffected because of the election process, which is messy, frustrating, inefficient, and way to long. Vote anyway! It's still one of the best ways you can influence your government, and your ballot does make a difference. Just look at what's happened so far in Iowa and New Hampshire.