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Childbirth is not an abstraction. Why do I even need to point this out?

May 1, 2012

This refers to an interview I gave earlier – one that, I hope, won’t be published, because it was all kinds of whack. Let’s just say that it was for a Scandinavian publication that bills itself as women-oriented. The person who interviewed me is welcome to respond in the commenting section, but something tells me they won’t. 

A lady called me and said she wanted to talk to me about childbirth and motherhood, because she saw an article I wrote about it earlier. It seemed cool in principle, of course, but the entire thing will have gone down a whole lot better if the lady in question maintained a tangible link to reality.

First of all, “why did you want to have a child?” is kind of a weird question to ask – because there’s no single explanation, really, and because wanting to have a child is like… wanting to have a child. It’s very hard to compare this desire to any other desire. I suppose some people may disagree, but as I was answering a personal question, directed at me and me alone, there was only one straight answer I could give: “we wanted it because we wanted it.” I included my husband in the response, because having Lev was a joint decision.

Now perhaps this may not be the most elaborate answer, but even so – that’s not a reason to get mad at me. Because that’s what this lady did. She got mad. Now, I work as a journalist, I realize that every once in a while, you’ll call someone up, expect to hear one thing, and get another. It happens all the time – and there is no reason to get mad. Even if you’re writing a piece with a very specific bent – you can’t get mad at your source for not giving you something that you want. If sources just went around giving people what they wanted all of the time, the entire journalistic profession would be meaningless. The whole point of journalism, good journalism, that is, is exploration. That’s what I believe.

So I was surprised to hear the anger in her voice, but didn’t quite hang up, because I was curious as to where it was all going. She then asked me questions about my professional life and my creative work (I work as a journalist in the English-language media, and write plays in Russian, for the sake of context) – which seemed reasonable. But what happened next is that she tried to get me to agree with the following statement: “Giving birth to a child is just like writing a play.”

Um, what? Hell no it ain’t!

“But these are both creative acts,” she said. Well, of course, sure, in one way, they are. But producing a play isn’t going to land me in mortal danger should I be SOL when it comes to finding a good hospital. I don’t scream and writhe in agony as I sit there typing, trying to make a festival deadline – though that would be hilarious to do in the middle of a crowded coffee shop, I suppose (well, roughly for 30 seconds or so anyway. Before they kick me out). Writing a play doesn’t involve putting the lives of two people – mother and baby – on the line. I mean, Jesus Christ. I realize that making a surface comparison is perfectly alright, but this lady was really pressuring me to admit that there really is no substantial difference.

But fine, whatever, I disagreed, time to move on, I guess. Then she asks me, in a really pissed off kind of voice (by that point, I really stopped hoping that there was some sort of miscommunication going on), if I believe that childbirth and “generally becoming a mother” (her phrase) is “somehow a unique experience.”

Um. Well. How do I put this gently? Yes?!

So then she went on about how “offensive” this is to someone who will never give birth to a child. Which is… I’m sorry, but no.

I firmly believe that the definition of motherhood should be broad. There are a lot of people who become mothers without the physical act of giving birth to anyone. That’s just fact.

But the physical side of it – conceiving, carrying, giving birth, breast-feeding (assuming you do that) – well, that’s pretty damn unique, and there’s nothing “offensive” about saying that. These physiological processes are not abstractions. I understand that sometimes people want them to be – for the sake of an ideological paradigm, usually – but that want doesn’t change anything.

When I think about the year 2011, I think to myself, “We had a baby, my husband shot his first movie, I wrote my first big play.” So obviously, I do think of these things as life-changing experiences, and I put them in a row. I think that’s normal, I think a lot of people do that. What I’m not going to do is say that these experiences are one in the same.

“I suppose you think that no woman’s life is complete without a baby,” my interviewer then said. Um, no? I think that these matters are very individual. I’ve seen people genuinely suffer when told, for example, that they will be unable to bear a child. I know some women who have a lot of mixed feelings about their past abortions – for example, it’s not unusual to hear that a woman may have kept her pregnancy, had she been better off financially (and I wish to God that we didn’t live in a crazy, polarized world, where such women become political footballs, completely stripped of their dignity and used as pawns in a ridiculous debate about outlawing choice). I know a couple of older women who will say that they regret that they never met “the one” – and by “the one” they will mean a partner they would have wanted to raise a child with. But that knowledge doesn’t clash with the fact that some of my friends are happily childfree, plenty of older people I know are happily childfree (so that old chestnut about childfree folks “living to regret it” really does not apply) and that, in general, some people have no interest in going through with this huge physiological process OR with adoption or whatever, and that’s fine. That’s normal.

I really hate the fact that nobody is allowed to experience complex emotions about parenthood in general. For example – I love my son and consider him to be the best thing to have ever happened to me. Does this mean that I never have doubts about motherhood? Hell no. I’m not a robot. I didn’t just download the “happy mommy” program to my hard drive and press install. I’m a person. I have doubts and fears. Some of my friends who have made the decision to not have kids also have doubts and fears. That’s normal. It’s what people go through. No amount of ideology is going to change this fact.

My interviewer didn’t agree. Not that she’d let me explain any of this, of course. Instead, she raised her goddamn voice at me, and started lecturing me about the statistics on domestic violence in Russia. It took me a while to understand that she was implying that my husband must have beaten or intimidated me into becoming a parent. I hung up soon after, but I’d like to make the obvious point here: nobody gets to talk that way too me. In the immortal words of Danny Glover, I’m too old for this shit.  That’s the other “unique” thing about being a parent, I suppose – it ages you in seen and unseen ways and makes you less willing to put up with other people’s crap.

Posted in Dirty Politics, Idiots on Parade, Personal Essays, The F-Word | Tagged | 8 Comments »

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What hath mommyhood wrought?

April 24, 2012

Nowadays, a modern person has to be careful about implying that there is anything “unique” about motherhood. After all, you don’t want to imply that someone who is not a mother, or else not a mother in the traditional sense, has somehow been deprived of a unique experience.

The physiological aspects of traditional motherhood – gestating a person, giving birth to them, and then likely going on to nourish them with your body for some time – are pretty damn unique experiences. And there is a reason why people who have had these experiences tend to bond over them the way soldiers do.

But mommyhood, whether biological or otherwise, also affects different people differently. It has a tendency to change people – but in different ways. Some people become mothers – and, as a result, grow intellectually and spiritually and what have you. But motherhood can also expose your fundamental weaknesses and character flaws, and leave you face-to-face with your own shortcomings. Because it is physically and emotionally taxing, because it limits your lifestyle in some very basic ways, it can slough away at your illusions and whatever comfortable mythology you have built up around yourself in your years on earth. When you’re taking care of someone very small and vulnerable, and yet very demanding, you learn a lot about yourself, and not all of that knowledge will be comforting.

You’ll find that you have a lot of work to do on yourself – and not a whole lot of time and energy to do it.

Of course, every once in a while, you also go to the pool:

At the pool, you hand the baby to the husband (who, being a stereotypical husband, loves playtime), and reflect (haw haw) by the water for a bit.

How has motherhood changed me? Well, it has changed my body. It has rewired my brain – and honed my reflexes. It has rewritten something fundamental inside of me, some great big block of code that comprises that entity known as the soul. It has made me more attuned to suffering and injustice – behind every murder victim or every person illegally convicted in a corrupt court, I see someone’s small child, some little smiling face. It has made me more aware of the terror of nature, and the terror of fate, and yet less helpless somehow, because I have a dependent, I cannot crap out. It has made me more aggressive – something I would normally welcome, except that keeping my aggression in check is important when I go home in the evenings, and close the front door, and am alone with my family. The power I now possess must be used wisely, or else it can destroy my relationships.

I take more responsibility and yet live more dangerously. Or that’s how I feel, anyway.

A childless (not to be confused with childfree – that’s not how she identifies herself) friend recently admitted that she was “scared” of me or “scared to end up like [me]” – she wasn’t sure which. I think those feelings are normal. At 25, when I first started longing for a child, I would have been scared of my future self too. She’s got bigger boobs that don’t fit into any of her old clothes, a leaner wallet and a meaner attitude. She can sing “Old McDonald Had a Farm” with a straight face.

;)

Posted in Lyovka, Personal Essays, Pictures, The F-Word | 20 Comments »

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Lisa Taddeo, cheating, power and sexy ladies!*

March 24, 2012

* – I mostly just threw in that last bit for the hysterical Google search terms that will show up in my stats. Maybe.

I have no idea who Lisa Taddeo is, first of all. The fact that I’m even blogging about her just shows you how derivative the Internet is. A friend sends a link of this Jezebel piece that’s skewering Taddeo’s Esquire piece - and I am right in that place where my stamina is too low for work and too high for just gazing out the window and muttering curses about the un-spring-like weather, so I read both. And while there’s plenty to make fun of in Taddeo’s piece (she writes sentences like “…her blond tresses cascading murderously across the tile like southern blood” – which is… No. Seriously, no. Though it might have worked without that last part about the blood, i.e., it might have worked if the editor were paying attention), there’s some to think about as well, because buried amongst Taddeo’s lulzy metaphors is kind of an important point:

Why is marriage still so important – particularly in urban, cosmopolitan America? Because a whole lot of people have fun destroying it as a concept. In fact, they have so much fun destroying it, that once it’s destroyed, they reanimate its corpse so they can quickly go to town on it again. And people who solve their own insecurity issues by challenging monogamous norms are doing it in such a way as to prop the entire institution up.

I don’t know if Taddeo is self-aware enough in her piece to understand that this is what she is effectively doing. She talks about sleeping with other people’s husbands and fiances because it places her “crudely, smilingly, on the side of the winners” – i.e., makes her feel powerful. She takes particular glee in zeroing in on the weaknesses of other people’s relationships – “every time I meet a married woman, I think about the things she does that likely annoy her husband” – because it places her in an advantageous position. It’s like engaging in long range combat from a comfortable hideout vs. going in for messy melee attacks, if I can be permitted my own lulzy metaphor for a second. It’s very, very easy to ridicule other people’s relationships, because it’s not as if you’re in them, taking damage.

Finally, Taddeo sets herself up as the hot chick who triumphs over the pathetic wives of the men she bangs – because she’s hotter and more profound and reads David Foster Wallace out loud by gleaming pools of water – which is important, because you have to examine how she gets her validation in this instance. A woman a guy risks his marriage for has to be hot by default – but only if marriage itself remains important, both as a general concept and to the guy in question. If you couldn’t give a crap about your wife finding out that you’re boning some other woman on the side – then you might as well just bone anyone! And Lisa Taddeo isn’t just anyone, dammit.

The entire premise of Taddeo’s article, the Truth about Why We Cheat, the sort of thing that Ordinary People probably Cannot Handle, has to do with a kind of languorous tug-o-war about different values we place on different things. Remove the conflict from it, and it ceases to be that interesting.

Having been the Other Woman who once upon a time wrote tedious essays about the drama and the hotness of it (I may still inflict some of them on the world if I ever write a memoir. But will make sure to get a better editor. My evil knows some bounds), I do wish that Taddeo has taken the time to self-examine a bit more, instead of merely going for a catchy turn of phrase. She talks about the death of her parents having possibly affected her, but doesn’t seem interested in the  how and why. Mostly she just revels in secret knowledge (i.e., I know I’m sleeping with your husband, bitch, and you don’t! Mwahaha!) and the fact that she is, at the very least, not the woman who’s in the kitchen alone, waiting for her husband to come back from God-knows-where, and imagining all sorts of unpleasant scenarios. It’s like being an assassin or a sorceress or something awesome like that.

If you’re afraid of losing the people you love – or loving anyone to begin with – you’re probably not going to want a relationship which is as simple and as scary as involving two people making some kind of commitment to one another, particularly if said commitment is public. If you’re afraid of growing older, grayer, saggier and increasingly sexually irrelevant – then you might, as Taddeo does, argue for “Wild Moments” in which you are the glamorous temptress, rather than a dowdy, trusting, familiar companion. If you already know, in your heart, that happiness ends – then it might as well end for everyone. You want to be the wrecking ball tearing through the house whose foundation is already rotted through. Wrecking balls don’t have feelings.

And in a nation where the media now presents images of people so flawless that they might as well be cyborgs, where mortality is rejected and acting your age, past a certain point, is seen as giving up – being a mistress or even the accidental “crumpet on the side” is probably a helluva lot more comforting than being in the thick of things. And because marriage is sacred, everyone, people all over the world, knows that you can’t just say, “I’m bored” or “I need a break” or “Something is seriously wrong here.” Well, not most of the time, anyway. Most people’s choices come down to suffering in silence or cheating on the sly.

Because I’ve been in Taddeo’s position, I can honestly say that nobody knowingly gets into such an arrangement, where you’re someone else’s secret, unless you have something to prove. I think a lot of pathologically nice people who seek approval actually crave this position from time to time – you can be the bad guy, without a whole lot of effort on your part. Knowing this, I’m actually pretty sympathetic to where Taddeo is coming from – or would be, if Taddeo took herself just a little less seriously in this piece. Once again, I get that her parents died – and I don’t know how much digging within herself a person in her position can handle. Maybe going before a national audience and laying out this stuff under the guise of “I’m going to tell you sheltered people the truth about infidelity” wasn’t such a good idea. Or maybe Taddeo just really couldn’t give a crap, dunno.

If you’re the neurotic writer sort – cheating is like living inside a novel! A bad one, maybe, but still. If you’re an Other Woman, for example, you might even run into the Man and his Official Woman in public – and then gleefully flirt with other men right then and there, only to raise your eyebrows imperiously when he confronts you about it later. “Darling,” you’ll say, imagining yourself to be Joan Crawford. “Don’t be so tediously hypocritical.” The plot will practically write itself! As someone who has lived through all that – and then ended up marrying one fine day, and having a baby on yet another fine day, I can safely say that yes, it’s the latter position that makes you more vulnerable. You have a lot more to lose. And you don’t have nearly as much time to write – let alone to condition your hair and stuff (Taddeo is all about the hair) – with a baby around.

But you make your choices in life – and you roll with them, for better or for worse. You take responsibility. You don’t blame everything on a Tom Waits song on the jukebox (for real?). Though there is comfort in knowing that someone with a reasonably crazy past has an easier time staying in and playing “Skyrim” with a baby sleeping and dreaming at their breast – or so I’ve discovered about myself, anyway. I’ve discovered I’m capable of more love than I thought I could handle – which. is. awesome.

And if you are going to go to that level of the game,  incidentally, you ought not cancel the crazy completely. I almost feel like that’s the real mistake so many couples make, and what Taddeo may essentially be writing about. I just wish she wasn’t so damn smug about it. If you’re writing about manhattans that “taste like the future,” you can’t afford to be smug.

Posted in America, Friends & Neighbours, I Like To Read, Kultur, Personal Essays, Pop Culture Essays, The F-Word | Tagged | 20 Comments »

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I’ve been working

December 2, 2011

Or, you know, goofing off, depending on how you look at it.

You know, Ekaterina Zatuliveter is NOT a spy. I’m amazed at the slut-shaming this woman has endured. All because she’s Russian and gravitates towards older, powerful men. In a normal world, this would have been a phase she would have grown out of – upon which she would have penned a whimsical screenplay about it. You know, something like “Guinevere,” but with more mass market appeal.

Also,  my translation of the Nicholas Seeley interview with Sergei Lukyanenko, Russian fantasy writer extraodinaire and author of “Night Watch,” et al, is out in Strange Horizons. This was a trilateral effort: Nick, Shari Perkins, and myself.

Went to the “Khodorkovsky” premiere at Artdokfest film festival today. Didn’t stick around. They herded the guests into a ridiculous line – honestly, the Khudozhestvenny movie theater is not the best place for a festival of this magnitude. The woman in line next to me had huge sapphire earrings like something out of a period drama. I got bored very quickly. Didn’t get my goddamn press badge either, will have to go tomorrow. “But we e-mailed you that you have to get it by six!” “No you did not, goddamit!” Anyway, I warned them that I’ll be arriving to claim my badge with an infant in tow tomorrow, festival ambiance be damned.

Posted in Dork-Out, Good News, Russia, The F-Word, Work | Tagged | Leave a Comment »

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You know why “call-out culture” sucks?

October 19, 2011

It sucks because it’s largely derivative.

Someone writes a critique of, say, a TV show. Then someone else critiques the critique. Then a legion of ANGREE PEOPLE shows up in the comments section of the critique that’s critiquing the critique, furious about some WORD that the critic used, a word that is OFFENSIVE in some contexts, though perhaps not in others. The outrage spreads to Twitter, and causes exasperated status updates on Facebook, which then prompt philosophical debates in the comments to said updates – debates that are Godwinned within 24 hours, because that’s just how some people roll.

I don’t know about you – but I’ve got, like, real life white pride marches and violence against journalists in Moscow getting most of my attention these days. If someone pisses me off on Twitter, I might flame them for a second, then get on with my freaking day.

Call-out culture seemed meaningful when I was younger, richer and stupider. I have a child now, for God’s sake. I have a husband. We’re adults. We go to IKEA and stuff. I’ve got the receipts to prove it!… I seriously have better things to do.

Posted in Dirty Politics, Friends & Neighbours, The F-Word | 6 Comments »

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Back at work full-time

September 3, 2011

It’s way hard – but I’m happy about it, because it brings the right sort of balance for a person such as myself. I get to work on the newspaper during the day, and come home to Lyovka at night, and I’m not overwhelmed by the minutae of home life – though neither do I have the chance to get overwhelmed by what we do at work. My brain just goes into “home mode” once I have Lyovka in my arms – and home mode is something I have struggled with before we had our son.

None of this stops random people from passing judgement – where would I be if it wasn’t for their sage opinions on everything from whether or not using an electrical breast pump is “wrong” to whether or not I’m a “real mother” at all now? Please, don’t hesitate to keep your superior wisdom to yourself, o Weird Dude In the Elevator Who Glimpsed My Breast Pump In a Paper Bag! I genuinely want to discuss the fact how I am a total freaking idiot – because the only thing that worked for your wife is a manual breast pump, and it’s “more natural that way.”

Ahem.

Lyovka, meanwhile, is amazing. He has my hair colour and forehead so far – but looks like his dad otherwise. When he gets upset and cries, he looks like a pumpkin. Or a tomato. We call him tykvochka and pomidorchik, then. “Uh oh, the pomidorchik is starting to grow.”

Our nanny is Ukrainian and knows all about borscht.

I’ve been busy working on a film treatment based on my new play at night – which works out great if Lyovka sleeps between night-time feeding sessions, and not so great if Lyovka doesn’t sleep between night-time feeding sessions.

The deadline is approaching, but there are always more deadlines in sight.

Posted in Lyovka, The F-Word, Work | 7 Comments »

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False labour

July 7, 2011

Is like a constant series of goddamn teaser trailers.

Posted in The F-Word | Tagged | 7 Comments »

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Dear Scott Adams, it’s mostly FEMALE lions who hunt. And so on.

June 16, 2011

So Scott Adams, the man behind Dilbert (oh the humanity!), showed his ass again. I read about it on Feministe. I’m not going to link to his original post – because screw it.

Still, I’d like to address it. Because oddly enough, I do agree with Scott Adams on one important point – there certainly IS a crisis of masculinity going on in countries like the United States. Though I don’t believe that said crisis hinges on the whole notion of “ZOMG men are not allowed to rape! Their natural instincts are being suppressed by hairy-legged feminist-types!”

First of all, let’s get real about rape – it happens, and most of the perpetrators get away with it. Every once in a while, you’ll have a terrible story like the Duke lacrosse fake rape thing – but the majority of sexual assaults are real, and nobody presses charges afterwards. There is usually too much shock, denial, and, hey, most women are raped by guys they know. It’s hard for them to reconcile such a breach of trust with the image they have in their heads – the image of the guy as just a normal fella.

Most rapists, I believe, don’t even refer to their actions as “rape.” Some are sick individuals who get off on the violation, but the majority, I think, don’t really get the concept of consent, and have been brought up to believe that certain women and girls are “asking for it,” etc.

There are also frequent cases of men raping other men, or boys. And I’m not just talking about prison. Hardly any of that ever gets reported.

And sometimes, women will rape men too. And most of these situations revolve around someone being drugged. And how many of those do you think are ever reported?

So the way I see it, we do, in fact, allow rape. Even though, as a society, we believe that it’s wrong – we don’t exactly deal with the issue. We merely pay lip-service to it.

Now, for some reason, Scott Adams seems to believe that rape is the most natural thing in the world. Which is odd, because how exactly does one define “natural”? Even in some of the most patriarchal societies to date – rape was framed as kinda a problem, whether for property reasons (“You violated my woman! But she BELONGS to me!”) or otherwise. Even societies that think of marital rape as no big deal, for example, tend to think of it as a violation – if not one that anyone needs to worry their pretty heads over it.

Scott Adams believes that men are basically born into a world in which their “natural instincts” are framed as “shameful and criminal.” It’s not that surprising to me that an American man, even a highly successful, even famous, American man should feel this way. Actually, fame and success are sort of part of the issue here, are they not? Being famous and successful, you have farther to fall. You are way more scrutinized. And as such, you being to scrutinize yourself more. And you realize that there are gaps in your self-knowledge. And you can’t address those gaps in a meaningful manner, because you have, indeed, had your sexuality pathologized for most of your life. Just not in the way that you think.

Americans are not big on sexual honesty. We’re not encouraged to make sense of our desires. The best most people can do is learning socially acceptable catchphrases, such as “no means no” – and hardly ever address the issue of why we need such catchphrases to begin with.

Scott Adams writes:

The way society is organized at the moment, we have no choice but to blame men for bad behavior. If we allowed men to act like unrestrained horny animals, all hell would break loose.

Society is not organized this way “at the moment.” It has always had rules. Rules have shifted over time, but rules are also the general reason why the “lion and the zebra at the watering hole” is not a valid comparison to men and women and rape. Even if you cast notions of morality aside, our brains are more complex than the brains of lions and zebras. Such complexity demands order – and justification for said order. Order is a fluid concept – but it’s also what has allowed the human species to become dominant on planet Earth.

If a man is just an unrestrained horny animal – then the entirety of human history fails to make sense. Look at Einstein. He was really into ladies…

… In fact, he was a cheater, some people even claim he was a rapist – or just a creep of sorts. He was also, um, Einstein. All jokes aside, I somehow doubt that Einstein developed the theory of relativity simply as a way to avoid dealing with “natural” sexual frustration. Rather, Einstein was a complicated human being, like everyone else, and he had his sexual urges and possibly even his violent urges – and he had his urge to do complex theoretical work. He had an oulet for his ideas – he probably had way less of an outlet for his issues with women. Was his excellence in physics unnatural? Whereas his troubled personal relationships were just dandy?

“We have no choice but to blame men for bad behaviour” – oh no! So if Einstein decided he was just going to run around and hump everything in sight, and he had never become a great physicist, this would be, like, a good thing? A natural thing? I’m fairly certain that Einstein’s brain was bigger than his dick – and I’m also fairly certain that nature, the Holy Grail of guys like Scott Adams, planned it that way – but using one and not the other would be, like, OK? And in the best interests of the human race? Wow, who knew?

I think the real problem with guys like Scott Adams is this whole fact that most American guys are brought up with the idea that they are undesirable (in fact, Einstein may have had the same problem growing up in Munich!). Just like women, when you think about it, but this insecurity is taught in a different way. The average American guy internalizes a lot of bullshit about “alpha males”, and judges himself accordingly. The lucky few are natural-born pussy magnets, the rest have to scramble and compensate somehow – that’s the game. It’s really messed up, and I think it screws up boys big-time. These boys are not taught to value themselves – at best, they’re taught how to be cocky as a means of covering up a bunch of self-esteem issues. They’re taught that their sexuality is totally separate from the rest of their identity – like an atrophied muscle. And women, they’re taught, don’t really like them. And they should pay women back in kind – should they get steamrolled or otherwise humiliated. So hating women and desiring women physically is framed as normal.

It’s a crappy situation and it affects more people than Scott Adams could shake a “round peg” at.

Posted in America, Bad News, Friends & Neighbours, The F-Word | Tagged , , | 7 Comments »

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Money and the (pregnant) ladies: song and dance

June 12, 2011

I fell for you jiving and I too you in
Now all you’ve got to offer me is a drink of gin

Why don’t you do right?
Like some other men do
Get out of here and get me some money, too

Unlikes some other women I know, I have no problem admitting that I want a guy to pull his weight – and then some. Especially when you’re expecting a baby, geez. It sucks being a hugely pregnant breadwinner, when you’re not “winning” that much “bread” to begin with – and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It sucks going to the readers of this blog, cap in hand, because your cashflow issues are about to ruin your credit history – and much worse. I mean, what’s a credit history when you’re going, “Hmmm, do I buy meat or do I buy prenatal vitamins?!” Though I am incredibly grateful to the readers of this blog – both ones I know, and ones I’ve never spoken to before – who have been so generous in these last few weeks. I used to get very embarrassed when accepting gifts, but now I am just absurdly grateful.

As I have found out, cashflow can also hinge on communication. When we found out about my pregnancy, my theater director husband expressed his wish to remain in film school – but said he would do odd jobs to help out. My response? I initially talked him out of it. I thought I could do alright on my own financially, considering the stuff I had lined up, and I thought that film school was ultimately more important. Which it is – especially if you want more contacts and job offers down the line – but it’s not the end-all, be-all of existence. Especially not with a baby on the way. This is what I’ve had to learn the hard way.

There used to be shame, for me, in admitting that I want to be financially dependent and taken care of every once in a while. That shame is loooong gone, baby. I don’t need to strike a pose and cock my gun and act badass – when I’m not actually badass. I feel rather like a girl in her mother’s too-big pumps and some clown make-up, playing a role. I suppose this is why so many women dread pregnancy to begin with.

The actual physical state I’m in, though, I don’t find dreadful. It’s been an amazing process, from the first flutterings to the karate kicks. “I am a little barge, bouncing on the big ocean waves, with a little passenger on board,” I tell my husband when I’m being particularly wistful and passive-aggressive. “I am a little barge. Water splashes on my deck.”  Sometimes, I go full-on Linda Hamilton in “T2,” when she’s having one of her moments: “You think you’re so creative. You don’t know what it’s like to really create something; to create a life; to feel it growing inside you…” She did have a point.

And all of that taken into consideration, I still don’t think that greater happiness is possible – when it’s just me, my husband and The Globe, and The Globe is all animated, making his father laugh. I’m glad I realize that now. It would be hard to look back on this years and years down the line, and go, “Well, damn. We were so happy. Funny how I never realized as much.”

Posted in fandom, Personal Essays, Russia, The F-Word, Videos | Leave a Comment »

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Yes, a fighter and NOT a mage

June 1, 2011

I have walked into D&D games and had some snarky asshole male gamer ask me where my chainmail bikini was, or give me shit for wanting to play a fighter rather than a cleric or a mage…

Ren, Sexism in Gaming series

I like drawn out, single-player RPGs with a bunch of side quests – games I come back to for months on end, which are an entirely private experience (private, in the sense that I’ll have an amused member of my household stand over my shoulder and say things like, “Just give up on the Deathclaws* already”). I don’t really want to interact with other gamers most of the time; hell, I don’t even connect much to the “Little Big Planet” network. I’m a lone wolf, goddamit, and I just don’t want to deal with douchebags. And even if you don’t have voice chat, the douchebags will pick you out if you happen to have a female-sounding nickname in particular.

Still, because I invest so much time and energy in my characters, I do, occasionally, want to share them in some way or another. When I was playing “Elder Scrolls”, I was particularly proud of my character – a female Dark Elf I named Mido (I named her after my then-boyfriend’s brother, because I bought the game around the time of his high school graduation, as corny as it sounds). Mido was a warrior character, specializing in swords and heavy armour. Some of that heavy armour made her look a little bit ridiculous, but I still give props to the game designers  - no stupid chainmail bikinis for my Dark Elf.

Now, there are plenty of cool spells and the like in “Elder Scrolls,” but I always felt more confident with a sword. And what I found is that many people viewed the mage-type characters as having been designed exclusively “for girls.” Why? A whack of the sword indulges my inner bloodthirsty savage, dammit. In “New Vegas,” I similarly enjoy blowing the heads off various people and creatures. I can’t wait for the inevitable bloodshed and doom of “Skyrim.”

I don’t think there’s anything inherently “girly” about a mage character either. In “Elder Scrolls,” I found magic trickier to pull off, truth be told. I could never aim my spells right, for example – and I was often pretty lax about acquiring the more complicated ones (until I got to the Mages Guild storyline, I suppose). I always felt that battle magic in “Elder Scrolls” required more work, and as such, was more challenging.

Same goes for sneaking and archery skills in “Elder Scrolls” in particular. The former I eventually mastered, the latter I pretty much consistently sucked at. In analyzing why, I’ve come to the conclusion that these activities weren’t nearly as useful to me in channeling my own aggression. Like Ren points out in her series – gaming is often about being able to be someone you’re not, someone you want to be. I’m not good when it comes to anger issues – wiping out a nest of vampires in a cave somewhere does actually help, even if all of the action occurs on a television screen.

Snobs dismiss gaming as mindless escapism, but the act of escaping is never particularly mindless. It tells you a lot about yourself – as you get busy lovingly putting down a bunch of frag mines in order to appropriately welcome an approaching Deathclaw or get ready to finally say goodbye to Umaril the Unfeathered, the Liberace to Dagon’s Rob Zombie. I have found the escapism especially useful while pregnant, because it’s not as if I can run a few kilometers right now in order to deal with rage. Angry pregnant ladies, take note: gaming can be good for you.

hey bitch

As a writer, I pay special attention to plot arcs in RPGs, and I find the whole structure of games to be very useful when it comes to writing fiction, though that’s a whole other story. For now, I’m just grateful that the medium exists in one way or another – and I’m glad that it’s evolving. And being an asshole to women because more and more of them are also claiming it as their own will, hopefully, get old eventually. I mean, look at it that way – my husband likes me way more after I’ve just killed a bunch of zombies. I become a more pleasant person. Everyone wins.

* – For those who aren’t familiar with the Fallout series, Deathclaws are bad motherfuckers, and not in an endearing, Samuel L. Jackson way either. They look like Satan on dinosaur legs, and repeatedly hand your ass to you. 

Posted in Dork-Out, fandom, Friends & Neighbours, The F-Word | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments »

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