Look homeward

I was in the U.S. Embassy applying for a new passport for Lyovka the other day.

If you’ve been in Moscow long enough, you’re struck by how efficient and friendly the staff at the U.S. Embassy tend to be (on a sidenote: when my Russian husband and I were getting our paperwork approved at the Foreign Ministry in order to get married on Russian soil, everyone was also really efficient and friendly as well – and that’s when it strikes you, the huge difference between the Foreign Ministry and the Federal Migration Service. The former is alright. The latter is Mordor). Nobody’s angry at you for showing up. If you couldn’t print the PDF form, they just provide you with one. There are comfy chairs in the waiting room. There’s a playroom too – where I nursed Lyovka last August.

At the security post. U.S. Marines watch you with their feet propped up. You wonder how they get on in the city. You want to go home. You remember that you no longer have one. “We’re women, our choices are never easy.”

I always knew that I would leave North Carolina one day, but not before it rewrote my DNA, made the arrow in my inner compass point ever westward. North Carolina is a chronic illness. The outbreaks are always inconvenient.

And there is so much death on the news. You want it to be meaningful – it is not. You want to mythologize death – it will not be mythologized. Planes fall out of the sky. Doctors kill infants through neglect – and grandly tell the mother frozen in the hospital corridor that “but you gave birth to a very sick child, we have all of the necessary paperwork – that we just made up to cover our asses.” People spend their days killing other people and go home to their families in the evening – talk shows scream from the windows of their apartments. The old are always burying the young.

You need permits to do anything, permits to live, permits to breathe – and yet no one needs a permit to stomp a bloody trail through someone else’s life. It just happens. These things happen. “We wanted what was best – it turned out like always.” Shrug.

When he sleeps in his mustard-colored pajamas, Lyovka looks a bit like a squash. After we put him to bed, we drink wine. If my husband is off working on a movie, I’ll write. Self-righteous middle-aged American women who may or may not drive SUV’s but tend to have “accepted Christ as their personal savior” send me nasty messages on Facebook – because I became a mother without asking Sallie Mae for permission. “I would have never had children if I were still in debt!” “Enjoy your rootless existence, watching your child grow up without a home!”

Lyovka’s concept of home is currently defined by me and his father. When he made his first trip to the Embassy, he spent most of it sleeping in his sling, tied tightly to my body like a baby kangaroo. “Can I see him?” The consular staff member asked. I came closer to the glass. This was official procedure. His birth was being recorded – we were notifying the government of his existence.

“Wow. What a peaceful sleeper.”

Two countries mingled within him, borders rearranged, and he slept on.

Student debt and double standards

So ever since this interview went up on Forbes, I’ve had a couple of people dropping in here to troll – of course.

I’m used to the trolling, but I’d just like to point something out:

Student loans reflect a double standard in our society. You, person who calls me “one of the worst examples of the selfish Me Generation” and you, guy who wrote in to say that I’m a “scumbag, worst of the worst, among the people who wants to take down the United States” – you are aware, right, that everything from gambling debts to child support payments can be discharged under bankruptcy, correct? The only reason why student loans cannot be discharged is due to tireless lobbying efforts – and in my view, lobbying is pretty much a form of legalized corruption.

Do you like Donald Trump? Think he’s a great guy? His companies have filed for bankruptcy four times, yet at no point was Trump cutting corners on health care or scrimping on glue for his toupee. The definition of “selfishness” in the United States is mightily skewed, if college grads with not a single asset to their name (like moi) face serfdom AND condemnation until the end of their days, while guys like Trump are lionized.

If I was irresponsible in borrowing money for my education – what about the people raking up hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of credit card debt? We, as a society, have long ago decided that these people should be allowed a chance to re-build their credit histories and otherwise move on with their lives. Not only is it in their best interests – but it is in the interests of our economy. Student borrowers, on the other hand, have somehow gotten stuck with the label of “lazy, worthless pieces of shit” (quoting another troll here) who are out to “bring down the economy” and must therefore “be made to suffer for the harm they’ve caused.” Investing in one’s degree? You’re worthless! Investing in gaudy designer handbags and other assorted forms of bling? You’re alright. Sure, you may have to do a lot of work to repair the damage – but at least we all understand where you’re coming from. We even have a term for it – shopping addiction. None of us think that said addiction ought to ruin anyone’s life.

Education is severely overpriced in America. But it is also practically the only means to be able to have an actual career. The generation gap has made sure that very few people who hold positions of power in our society – the lawyers, the judges, the senior politicians – are aware of the fact that times have changed. You went to college in the 80’s and found it affordable and managed to pay down your student loans in no time? Good for you! Guess what? It’s 2012 out there today – and your experience no longer applies. The price of education has risen dramatically – even as our opportunities in the workplace have been drastically reduced. Do the math. It’s no wonder why so many student borrowers are in trouble. As for the ones who aren’t – many of them receive help from parents and other relatives. I like what that Esquire piece by Stephen Marche says – we are becoming a patronage society, and that’s a depressing thought.

Obligatory media post-mortems

Of Bryansk.

Of one particularly high-profile tragedy in Bryansk. (I do think this particular case could have happened anywhere. But the domestic violence component is particularly troubling – as I have serious doubts that the mother in question could have gotten help even if she wanted to.)

And of the case of Oksana Makar in Mykolaiv, Ukraine. As I told Jessica Reed over at The Guardian – you write something like that, and then you need a hot shower and an opportunity to burst into tears without anyone looking.

All in a week’s work.

A trusted friend told me the other day that “you do this better than the light stuff.” He’s right – but I don’t know why he is right. Or maybe I do know – but don’t wish to say it to myself, or to anyone else, for that matter.

Lisa Taddeo, cheating, power and sexy ladies!*

* – 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.