BIG DEAL IMPORTANT-TIMES ANNOUNCEMENT!!!
Friends, my new (and only!) podcast, with Romper writer Miranda Rake, launched this month!!! It’s called Mother Culture, and we talk about — you guessed it —motherhood in the culture and the culture in motherhood.
Our fourth and maybe sauciest episode came out today - where we discuss the new Britney Spears memoir with the incredible Amanda Montei. We’ve talked about motherhood and doing-it-all, teacher’s strikes and the joy of maternal resistance, and whether it matters that kids are less independent than they used to be.
We have so many great things in store, including upcoming holiday-themed episodes with Sara Peterson and Angela Garbes.
We’re on Instagram! We’re on Apple! We’re on Spotify! We’re on a lot of other nerdy places you like! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE listen, and then, PRETTY PLEASE follow and rate/review us. It makes such a difference for a little-podcast-that-could-like-ours, and means that people who don’t know us are more likely to discover it.
Also, if you sign up for our free or paid Patreon, you will be able to participate in listener call-ins, get fun free gifts, and be the first to know when our new special spinoff, The Mother Culture Movie Club, gets started.
I am really and truly grateful for your pod-related support.
XOXO.
I have been thinking about men. I ran into a childhood friend, a guy who was at my first, sweet and silly co-ed sleepover, and he says he’s writing a book about male friendships. I told him he cannot write it fast enough. In high school, this friend did the morning announcements over the loudspeaker, a very risky thing to sign up for for any adolescent. He was always gentle and goofy, and very much himself. All the bros, or versions of bros we had at our diverse, inner-city school, pretended to tease him but absolutely adored him. They gave him a nickname, anointed him as un-fuck-with-able, mussed his curls in the hallways. Somehow they felt permission to love him, in the ways they were allowed to love.
My friend Leo, when he moved to another city, lamented the difficulty of finding good male friends. He decided his best bet was to go to the playground and ask the other dads, “What’s up? Do you go to therapy?” A friend, a more evolved young lady than I was at her age, a told her boyfriend when he proposed, “I'll marry you, but you’ve got to start going to therapy before we do.”
I have been listening, over and over, to Javelin, the latest album by musician Sufjan Stevens, which is tenderly uplifting in its way but also deeply, deeply sad. On the tremendous Will Anybody Ever Love Me?, he sings:
Hello, wildness, please forgive me now
For the heartache and the misery I create
Take my suffering as I take my vow
His partner, a friend of my family’s, died this year, and the way that Stevens writes and melody-cizes this relationship, in all its imperfections, and this massive loss, is devastating. Something about a man pleading his love and desire to be loved by another man makes it feel all the more poignant— needed.
I go to New York for ten days, despite my wackadoodle brain, and there, I think about men, too. At the New Museum, Judy Chicago asks “What If Women Ruled the World?” An entire wall-collage displays quotes from women, in response to this question. I take a picture of the sentence “Not one mass shooter in the US was female.” So obvious (true in rough form, if not wholly accurate), so gutting.
At first, an entire floor of portraits and artifacts from female creators, throughout history, “The City of Ladies,” feels too dated, too safe to have much impact. But it was a sneak attack. Walking through it left you with a few simple truths: you had never been in a room like this before, you hadn’t heard of most of these women, and a small, sticky part of you didn’t believe they were real.
I develop a little comedy bit, “Dude at a Judy Chicago Exhibit.” Most of this character is revealed through facial expressions, but he also talks loudly to another dude about unrelated things while failing to notice the non-verbal signals of his fellow museum patrons to shut the fuck up. We are looking at women who made art no one bothered to tell us about, bro.
In the gift shop, I buy a postcard for my daughter, and one for my son.
My brothers (who are truly my best guy friends) and I have Korean BBQ with our college-aged niece, Jasmine, who is already smarter than us. In her anthropology class, they debated the moment when we went from a primitive to a modern society. When humanity was born. Was it the spear? The bag?
We try all the banchan — so many ways of fermenting — and talk about Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” Le Guin maintains that culture began with a basket, with gathering, at least the culture she wants to descend from:
So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it. ("What Freud mistook for her lack of civilization is woman's lack of loyalty to civilization," Lillian Smith observed.)….
Go on, say I, wandering off towards the wild oats, with Oo Oo in the sling and little Oom carrying the basket. You just go on telling how the mammoth fell on Boob and how Cain fell on Abel and how the bomb fell on Nagasaki and how the burning jelly fell on the villagers and how the missiles will fall on the Evil Empire, and all the other steps in the Ascent of Man.
I want stories that are carrier bags, too, which I say explains why I don’t need to see Oppenheimer.
But Jasmine says it wasn’t the bag that distinguished us most as some other kind of species, but the first record of a broken and healed femur. Other people must have tended to that human, carried them while they got better. The first evidence of humanity then, was care.
Over the months that I have been mysteriously ill, my husband has become the most graceful caretaker. For weeks, he did everything, truly everything, without an exchange of words. He looked at me and knew what I could not do. He didn’t make me explain what I was or wasn’t capable of. He has worked hard to make sense of who he has been told to be. Years ago, I remember thinking, “even this man, even him???” He has learned to tell me what he needs, and the rest he gives freely. At night, he reads to me in bed.
At the Whitney museum, Jasmine and I meet the Mayor of the Meatpacking District, who stops me to compliment my vibes. “When you walked in here, you just commanded attention!” he exclaims. I have always been hesitant to see that character trait as an asset.
Ruth Asawa, the San Francisco-based artist who made all those looped-wire sculptures, had six children. When she became a mother, she asked another mother-artist how she could go on painting. “Just paint your life,” she advised, and thankfully, Asawa did.
Jasmine tells me about studying Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, whose name we both, embarrassingly, need a moment to recall. Her classmates couldn’t help but notice that, while the chapters of their texts devoted to Huerta gave much attention to the loss of having to leave her children for long stretches to fully devote herself to the cause, the passages on Chavez barely mention his eight children. They were affronted by this double standard, and we point out that it’s a loss for Chavez too, to be spoken of this way, without the context of the babies who he made, without mention of the care he had to withhold.
We talk about the good deeds of some men, how everyone forgets that the Black Panthers invented school breakfast, which my children eat every day, for free.
We also make plans to design stickers, sized for textbooks and museum exhibit descriptions, that you can place after the listing of a man’s accomplishments. The stickers will say:
(While women raised his children.)
I head upstate on the train, Ace of Base’s The Sign playing in my Uber to Penn Station, a good omen.
A car we pass inexplicably has the vanity plate “RABIES.” I am not sure what kind of omen this is.
Upstate, in the woods, I wander around, listening to the audiobook of Britney Spears’ new memoir and think about her dad and Justin Timberlake and K-Fed and her poor, emotionally-abused brother and just how many different flavors of fucked-up we can make a man in this society, including the flavor where we look for ways women have wounded them, look for the cause of their pain and often, their harm, anywhere but in their own shaping.
I do not know where I am going, and my brain is fuzzy now from all that city, it can’t survive my getting lost. I spot a man, bearded and Carhartted, very local, with a bright yellow jacket and shears. He tells me how to get to the waterfall, warns me of the steepness of the trailer I'm currently on. I wonder, what kind of man is he? Is he hard or tender? Is he slighted easily? Does he go to therapy? He seems to young for this, but is a woman raising his children right now? What does he care for, other than these woods? Does he know that, for a moment, I was afraid to be alone on this road with him? Does that make him as sad as it makes me?
Also, this:
I’m not all sad these days! One of the few things that seems to be getting better is Saturday Night Live. This season is jam-packed with truly hilarious sketches, some which feel like a return to a unashedly wacky sensibility, others which showcase some highly smart, new kinds of structure. Bad Bunny as a double-threat host was a revelation. Every single sketch he was in was watchable. Somebody please give this guy a movie deal, in literally any genre. Here are a few of my recent faves:
Seriously this is one of the sexiest men alive. Even my seven-year-old son admits that his voice “sounds like caramel.” THE RANGE.
The tightness of the A story and B story on this one is fab.
Stay with it, the commitment is staggering.
New cast member Chloe Troast is doing something I’ve never seen before.
Your "(while women raised his children)" stickers remind me of this wonderful set of worksheets for taking students on a field trip to see monuments; one of them invites you to draw pictures of all of the people whose labor made the acclaimed person's achievements possible. https://monumentlab.com/projects/field-trip
Hi Sarah! I am so excited to read his book on male friendships. I think this topic doesn't get enough attention. Thanks for posting about this! Also...I'm new to Substack, started a Vlog on social challenges around mom-cliques and making authentic friendships with other moms. I found myself feeling hurt this summer when a mom-clique formed and I was left out...felt like middle school all over again.