The Freedom to be Shallow

Virginia Woolf is amazing. I think that, of all the female writers who come to my head, she is my favorite. To have lived in times like hers and to have written as prolifically and from the heart as she did was an astonishing feat. 

I’ve just finished re-reading A Room of One’s Own. Originally published in 1929, this book is no less meaningful or important today than it was in 1929. I think that Woolf’s perspective is correct: when women rely on others for their well-being, we suffer creatively. Yet, when we must work to support ourselves, we also suffer creatively. Trying to write well and work at a job is very much like trying to raise children and have a successful career: something or someone suffers. If a mother is a good mother, her creative work suffers unless she is able to withstand the assaults of the modern world and a culture that surrounds us with demands to fill our lives with stuff.

Oprah Winfrey is the only respected woman I know of who has openly said (over and over again) that it is impossible to be an excellent wife, excellent mother, and be at the top of one’s career all at once. The last time I heard Oprah make this statement, the audience full of wives and mothers who presumably work full- or part-time and are thus doing a mediocre job at something, all broke out into applause. We all know it’s true; but we accept mediocrity, distracted mothering, faltering marriages, and harrying careers anyway–not to mention our stunted creativity. We seem to think it’s better to have a small, tasteless slice of every pie than to have something whole, robust, and satisfying.

At least, that’s how it appears to me, and I am like the other women in Oprah’s audience. Or was.

Woolf uses food as a metaphor for the contrasted lives of men and women. Men eat their lamb, braised vegetables, and delicate pastries and sip their fine wines to fine music and candlelight on tables set with the finest linen and silverware; women have prunes, biscuits and cheese, and drink water, “. . . for it is the nature of biscuits to be dry, and these were biscuits to the core” (18).

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes. We are all probably going to heaven, and Vandyck is, we hope, to meet us round the next corner–that is the dubious and qualifying state of mind that beef and prunes at the end of the day’s work breed between them (18).

Why do women dine on prunes and biscuits, while men eat fine food? Why do women come out on the short end of things? Money, of course. Men make money, and women make babies. Men have careers and women have husbands and children. Yet certainly women have some sort of time and talent for accruing wealth, for doing more than pushing out babies, Woolf asserts. If so, then. . .

What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us? Powdering their noses? Looking in at shop windows? Flaunting in the sun at Monte Carlo (21)?

At The Individual Voice, the author wrote recently about just this sort of nose-powdering, window-shopping, flaunting woman. Of course, she doesn’t use Woolf’s words or seek to trivialize other women (in this case, Mommies) in the blogosphere; I will do that myself. We all know the type of Mommy to whom the author refers: it’s the other mothers one meets when one picks up the kidlets after whatever activity they’ve just completed that is absolutely necessary to their health and well-being as American citizens. The author writes:

The essence of Mommy-blogging, from what I can tell so far, and I’m happy to be proven wrong, is that it talks about all the same things that moms at my children’s schools talked about that I couldn’t relate to. I always felt awkward, outside the conversation, like I couldn’t say the right thing, like I wasn’t on the same wavelength, didn’t find the jokes funny, just didn’t belong. The only friends I made, and even those shakily, were another writer and an acupuncturist, both also very different from the crowd, older for one thing. Aside from that, my friends are all former colleagues and classmates with Ph.D.’s and my friend V. from high school, a journalism professor who already published her first book.

We who are out of step are in good company. I doubt Virginia Woolf would have found Mommy bloggers compelling, either. I think this is because some people let their brain cells die off when they have children, because they think that being entirely devoted to mothering is merely a job, not an art. They don’t give themselves fully to their mothering, because they leave their intelligence, creativity and passion behind, and they dumb down to the lowest common denominator, and that lowest common denominator is an overweight soccer mom in baggy sweats, her hair pulled back with a scrunchy. Her name is Donna or Kathy, Linda or Vickie, Nicole, Amber, or Christy, and she has 2.5 children, a dog, a husband who is moderately successful, a brick house with a mother-in-law plan that will never house a mother-in-law under any circumstances, and a mini-van/Volvo station wagon/Ford SUV.  She reads Nora Roberts and her children are already a little chunky, too, because in spite of soccer and P.E. at school, she feeds them diets high in fat and empty calories. A banal, mundane, average American diet that never fed one damn person well. 

If we were like men, we could “go at ten to an office and [come] home comfortably at half-past four to write a little poetry” (21). This was the life of the comfortable male in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and it is very nearly the life of the comforable male in the early 2000s, too. Today’s man arrives home at half-past six, or half-past seven, and works harder and longer for less than did his great-grandfather; but he still arrives home and has the liberty to write poetry or read the paper, watch television or read a good book while his wife plans, shops for, cooks, and cleans up the dinner and then manages the clothing, homework, and extracurricular activities of the children, and then tries to manage the housekeeping if she can’t afford a cleaning service. After that, she grades papers or works on the proposal the boss sent home with her, or tries to write her thousand words.

If they’re successful, this couple can manage to outsource most of the mothering to a nanny, au pair, personal shopper, babysitter, or cleaning service. And they eat a lot of take-out and ready-made meals. But things haven’t changed that much, no matter how many cries of protest will be raised about enlightened fathering (and I am married to an enlightened husband and father, so no one can pull the wool over my eyes), it is still we women who are doing the lion’s share of work within the family. We’re not so very different, for all practical purposes, from the woman who lived in Woolf’s time.

But we could be. We could be different, because, unlike women in Woolf’s time, we can have a room of our own and our own money. We can do a man’s job and we have the right to do it, these days. We’re not “the little woman” any more; we’re not, as Woolf predicted would happen, the protected sex any more. But we are still the hearthkeepers whether we think so or not, and if you show me a woman whose inner hearthkeeper is absent, I’ll show you a Bad Mother. She is a woman who has become nothing better than a man, with an absentee female self.  One cannot have the production and creativity of Eve without going to the fertile womb.

We forget what freedom affords us. Freedom can be used, and freedom can be abused. Did so many women work so hard to push through the constraints of custom, law, time, and gender so that we could ruin ourselves with silly, shallow novels, relationships, diets, and lives? I’m reminded of St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, in which he implores

For you were called to freedom, brethren; only do not turn your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole Law is fulfilled in one word, in the statement, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you bite and devour one another, take care lest you be consumed by one another” (Galatians 5:13-15 NIV).

I love this passage because it reminds me that freedom is an opportunity. One can use freedom for oneself, or for oneself and others, or for empty pursuits that produce more emptiness. The “one another” means we must empty ourselves of all that is meaningless so that we can hold what matters, and give something meaningful to others. If, instead, I am consumed by others, I am no better than the empty calories most Americans (judging by statistics) are consuming, calories that make us the fattest nation on earth. I am to be consumed by something that is not someone else; something that is also not merely me; something that is bigger than self, which is the opportunity to turn my freedoms into actions that benefit the world by giving the world a full self. Ironically, the fullest sort of self is an emptied self who serves out of wholeness, much as Christ or Buddha emptied themselves and became love.

I think that if we who have the freedom to stand on the soccer field and talk about our easy crockpot beef stroganoff recipe and the trip to the orthodontist considered the price others paid for our freedom to be boring and shallow, we might begin to show up at soccer practice with Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Annie Dillard, or Joyce Carol Oates in tow. We might be carrying our iPods and using them as tools by listening to the multitude of free podcasts of great literary, philosophical, spiritual or political works instead of listening to Kathy, Christy, Vickie and Linda gossip about the gals who aren’t in the bleachers this week. I think if we thought about the price paid for our freedom, we would think long and hard before having an affair because we are seeking passion outside of ourselves, and we would find a way to kindle the passion within ourselves. We would stop wasting so much time and so much of our lives, and we’d actually begin to live.

I think that if we thought about the price women in earlier times paid so that we could have a room of our own and some money of our own, we would remember that sending our children to college might eventually make them educated, while we would remain silly, shallow mothers discussing recipes, other people’s marriages, or Us magazine. They will rightly surround themselves with more interesting people because we let ourselves go in every way in which a person can let herself go. Our minds grew as flabby as our thighs, and we did nothing to stop it because we hated ourselves. We thought this was good mothering and good wifing, when in fact it was the worst possible means of intellectual and creative suicide. We might as well have walked into the river with Virginia Woolf as get to the end of a lifetime and, upon looking back, realize that we never really lived.

In my other life I raced around having a successful career, seeing clients, running an international organization successfully, seeing my books in print, traveling the world, and maintaining a happy marriage and happy children. But I could see the handwriting on the wall, because on my way up the ladder of success I noticed more and more women who were intelligent, educated, and successful–but divorced, with children in drug or alcohol rehab, grandbabies aborted or born without daddies present, fractured relationships, women without northern stars and with large houses but no homes and no room of their own. We had our own type of shallowness, though we met in better restaurants and stayed at nicer hotels; we had large diamonds and our books were published by the best houses. We had agents or we were agents; one knew Matt Damon, while another had lunched with the Kennedys; a third dined with the prime minister of Japan and his wife only the previous month. This friend had won a literary prize, while another received an executive appointment. We were keynote speakers, we presented white papers, we conducted original research; we published poetry, we had showings of our art work. We ate good food, but it was still high in empty calories.

We read good books, certainly, but not many of them, and we let the New York Times dictate to us what we ought to read. None of us could say that we had read many of the great classics or knew how to search out meanings in original languages. We did not reason well because we had never studied logic, and our children still moved away and considered us dull, because nobody had any passion about anything. I realized all this one day, and I tendered my resignation. I had done everything I had ever wanted to do and succeeded at my career, and I went home to hang my awards on the wall and to become a deeper, more authentic woman who had something real to offer.

Most people seem to think that being successful means possessing the trappings of success, including having the successful, educated peers. I don’t agree. I’ve seen too many times that education can produce an educated bore.  It’s about character, not education or the trappings of success. I think that when Virginia Woolf wrote about integrity and passion, she was right to suggest that only the conviction that a person is speaking or writing truthfully, with the utmost sincerity of self, absent any agenda driven by rage or bitterness, can feed the soul.

I return again and again to the opportunity to become whole, and it is the only compelling reason for action that I can embrace. If the end results of one’s behavior, whether fathering or mothering, being a spouse or partner, or being in any other role, is not personal integrity and the absolute ability to know and speak one’s truth and to give oneself to others, then a person is no better than the prodigal son, wasting the one inheritance we are given and ending up eating with the pigs.

I adore Virginia Woolf because, though deeply sensitive, crazy and flawed, she had the sort of integrity that compelled her to keep working at being an entire self. Thank you, Virginia, for being yourself even when it pained you.

References

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harvest Books, 1989.