American Dream

Becoming my own standard.

In the early 00’s, I worked in Boston at a consulting company, managing a training program based on the bestseller, Who Moved My Cheese? One day as I was flipping through our bookstore catalogue, I discovered another catchy title: Purple Cow by Seth Godin. One of the main messages of the book is: "ship or it doesn't count". Meaning, if you don't get your work out into the world, no one can see, learn or be influenced by it. Born a few weeks early, I had always been an eager beaver. Shipping became no exception. Single with time and energy, I began to arrive early to work and stay until the parking lot lights flickered on to ship all things Cheese. When the program ended, I was promoted and given something else to ship.

I spent the next twenty years thinking of my work as a commodity to ship. I was known as Someone Who Gets Things Done. In the early days of Covid, however, I realized that shipping had morphed from idea-sharing into the way I proved my worth. I was an asset because I was productive. I had value, if I shipped. Did others think similarly? I wondered. I posted a poll to my Instagram story. I asked: "Have you ever defined your value by what you produced?". Every single person who responded said "yes". Probably not surprising but what was interesting is that they did respond. People I knew well and others who were total strangers nodded and agreed that they too, had defined their value by what they shipped.

Aside from having been raised in Connecticut, poet Ocean Vuong and I have nothing in common. But I remembered a line from his poem, “Thanksgiving 2006”, as I thought about the messages that came through Instagram after my story question.

"My mother said I could be anything
I wanted - but I chose to live."

I heard the same thing from my own mother: I could be anything I wanted. Maybe like me, some of those "yes" people, believed their parent when they were told that they could be anything. I had believed my mom. And I tried my hardest to be the thing I wanted. To make it. But it never occurred to me to ask why it doesn’t count if I don't ship. Or for whom does it not count? It isn't my mother. And it's not me either. Why was I not even my own standard?

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In 1957, Betty Friedan, a Smith College alum, conducted a survey of fellow Smith grads for their fifteenth reunion. Two hundred women responded to thirty-eight questions including demographical ones like how many children they had but also ones Friedan had intended to be reflective. Were they happy in their relationship? Were they able to speak openly towards their husband? Friedan found that her survey respondents yearned for more than the domestic life to which they had been relegated. She suspected that the unhappiness of American housewives, which she would later call "the problem that has no name", was a bigger story. That idea became her landmark book The Feminine Mystique.

In 1963, when The Feminine Mystique was published, my mother was in fourth grade. Second wave feminism was getting started. The focus, galvanized by Friedan's bestseller, was equality in the workplace and at home. My grandmother did not graduate from Smith. She married my grandfather after high school and became the typical housewife that Friedan wrote about. Her husband worked 8:30-5:00 at his appliance store and Grandma was in charge of the house and two girls: Mary and Jane, my mother. Later, when she was in high school my mother helped her father "with the books" at his appliance shop.

I started babysitting in seventh grade. The summer I was sixteen, I was hired in the deli of a gourmet grocery store because I was old enough to work the slicer. I worked there summers and school vacations through high school and college. My family didn't have legacy or connection, we had the class ethic of Work Hard. Work Hard trumped good grades. As long as I did my best, tried my damndest, Work Hard was what mattered, my parents told me.

By the 1980s, second wave feminism was ending. Feminists had made inroads for women into traditionally male professions and helped change perceptions of what family could look like. With wins like the Equal Pay Act and the Title IX bill, the American Dream of the self-made man became available to women for the first time. If you Work Hard enough in America, they said, anyone can make it. Work Hard makes it possible. Anyone can Have It All.

*

Born a few years after my mother, Ann-Marie Slaughter is someone who also grew up with the second wave idea that women, now, finally, could be anything. And for much of her professional life, the high profile feminist touted the successes of her long career as evidence of that truth. Until she didn't.

“I’d been the one telling young women at my lectures that you can have it all and do it all, regardless of what field you are in... Which means I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making millions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).”

Slaughter continues in her now famous 2012 op-ed “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” that she had been eighteen months into a two year appointment in the Obama Administration when she ran into a colleague at a fancy state department dinner. The colleague had boys about the same age as her own and Slaughter confided to the other mom how awful it felt being away from them. When all of this is over, Slaughter declared, she would write a piece titled “Women Can’t Have it All".” Instead of commiserating, Slaughter’s colleague was horrified. Slaughter quickly dropped the idea. But the following summer, when that high profile job ended, Slaughter wrote the op-ed.

Slaughter was right: women did feel they were to blame if they cannot have it all. At least I did.

A few months earlier, I had left my non-profit job because I couldn't have it all. I was eight months pregnant and constantly shipping. My agency, a domestic violence center, offered no paid leave and because of the merger we were in the middle of, there would be no guarantee of even the same job when I returned to work, post-baby. When I objected (at the same time, there was a pregnant woman at the other organization who would be given paid leave and same job security) I was coldly told that I could file a formal grievance with our Board. Instead of torching what felt like essential connections, I gave a month’s notice. During that time I recruited a former star volunteer to take over my job as an interim and logged detailed notes for my permanent successor. But even as I did so, I kept asking, "What’s wrong with me? Why couldn't I make it work?"

I should have known better. That non-profit job wasn't the first where I couldn't have it all. Two previous jobs in corporate America ended similarly. Despite Work Hard, shipping and even Leaning In, I kept coming up short. Intellectually, I knew I couldn’t be at fault for a career of dead-ends. (After all, when I gave notice at my second corporate job because I couldn’t afford to live less than an hour away, my boss told me, “we should have paid you more.”) But at the same time, women like Slaughter were loudly making it work. To blame anything other my own shortcomings felt like a weak cop-out.

*

But there was something I missed in the either/or thinking of "it's either my fault or the company's". Capitalism. Capitalism counts on an adherence to binary thinking. Win or lose. There is no middle ground. If I don't get ahead, I have no one to blame but myself. I didn't Work Hard. I didn't ship enough. Single-mindedness is essential to making the economic system run.

The "doing work that matters" narrative further complicates our thinking. You accept fourteen calendar days of vacation each year and settle for a paltry starting salary when the work that you do changes lives. When you fall asleep every night for three years knowing that you made a difference. The long on-call hours were worth it because women’s lives were being saved. Kids were learning the difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships. You Work Hard but you are not a corporate cog. Your work mattered.

And yet the moral high ground doesn't negate the fact that at 5:00, when I transferred the hotline, I often stayed at work for another 30 minutes or more off the clock. That despite training volunteers who would listen and not judge, I was eating lunch at my desk. Who was I, then, if not a cog in a machine? I can’t help but think that capitalism loves this conflation because it keeps us in Work Hard mode.

Capitalism is seductive. A personal sacrifice like moving away from your family to be closer to a job, as Slaughter did, feels like it's your own idea. And when that move is rewarded financially or with public praise, it starts to feel as if you have almost made it. You’re so close to the Dream, you can taste it. So you maintain your momentum as you push closer to Having It All.

Controlling, confusing, demanding, charming...capitalism is the ultimate abusive lover. Only instead of showing him our phone as proof of faithfulness, we complete timesheets. Come to work with a bad cold. Volunteer for another task. Anything to prove our value. That we are living up to the dreams of our feminist foremothers. But, it's all a lie. Having It All is a myth that capitalism invented and second wave feminist role models like Anne-Marie Slaughter barkered with their lives. There is never both fresh cake on a plate and buttercream in the mouth. Some days there is cake. As much as we want. Some days, only a smear of dry frosting.

No matter how much we ship or how Hard we Work, we will never Have It All. Because we are temporary cogs in the machine. Not eternal ones. With skin, soul, blood and voice, we are too real (and thus know how short life is) to not want something other than work. So when we roll the dice at Life, by starting a family or going back to school or taking a vacation day, we pause the machine. With the interruption, we become disposable because capitalism cannot support disloyalty.

*

In her 2009 book, Brightside: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, author Barbara Ehrenreich called Who Moved My Cheese? "the classic of downsizing propaganda". The premise of Cheese is that change is inevitable but when we can recognize the signs of change, it is less stressful and can even be positive. But Ehrenreich’s right; the book can feel like propaganda. And doubtless it was used by some in corporate America to support lay-offs, restructuring or not paying a livable salary. Yet, one of its main messages is "They Keep Moving The Cheese".

Whenever you think you're set, that you know what's up, something changes. Some systemic force decides something you wouldn't. Maybe it's that your colleague gets paid leave, not you. Or that your male co-worker gets the promotion. Some days capitalism is at fault. Other days, it's the patriarchy. Regardless, those systems of oppression, the universal "they," keep moving the cheese.

Once upon a time, shipping ensured my professional survival. I wouldn't have had the opportunities without the Work Hard ethic that fed constant shipping. But I'm not the same person I was twenty two years ago. No bangs, no sexy two seater and no longer a believer in "having it all". Until six months ago, I published Ripe Time bi-weekly. Every other week since 2014. Then I took a sabbatical to focus on writing. I signed up for a six week craft class. I organized a weekly meeting of a group of writers at my local library. Disloyalty sounds terrifying and yet, it can feel like liberation.

Moving forward, you won’t see me every two weeks in your inbox. I'm not going to go back to shipping to say that I did. To Pavlov myself into the external ding of capitalism’s approval. Because while they do keep moving the cheese, I can choose not to follow. To not choose their cheese at all. Or to whip up something else instead. Because what I want -more than anyone telling me I can be anything-is to live this life.

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What’s On My Mind:

• After almost three years of dodging Covid, I tested positive on Sunday. One lovely thing about being unwell, however, is that you get to see your community in action. On Wondermine, Larissa and I regularly talk about the importance of community (December’s bonus episode for Patrons is on friendlove) and why taking the time to cultivate relationships is essential. A neighbor dropped off cake. Another brought homemade biscuits and fig jam. Bev gave me a stack of fresh hardcovers and a puzzle. Larissa brought me soup and my favorite kind of Gouda. There were plenty of offers for support and well wishes. We need community everyday but when we’re depleted or in crisis, relationships become even more important because they help us weather our storm. At a time when we have fewer close friendships, are working more than ever and spending twice as much time parenting than we did fifty years ago, I feel blessed to be on the receiving end of such abundance. May you feel the same when you need it most.

What I’m Reading & Loving:

• Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey. As someone who has long struggled with associating my worth with what I ship (see above), Hersey’s words about taking back our bodies from capitalism and white supremacy with rest are really hitting me these days. I have read excerpts online here and listened to Hersey talk here and here and the book is on my Christmas wish list. (Pro tip: asking for certain books from your family is a way to show them what values you’re living or tying to embody right now.)

• There, There. I just finished this brilliant, cutting first novel by Indigenous author Tommy Orange. If, like me, you are someone whose knowledge of contemporary Native American lives is limited to what you see in the news or depressing statistics about violence and addiction, you need to read this book. It’s a fly-on-the-wall read that I cannot recommend highly enough.

• Meet Me By The Fountain by Alexandra Lange. Totally fun, smart and accessible read (with photos) about the evolution and decline of shopping malls. A must for anyone who’s ever smelled a Cinnabon in a crowd and slowed their walk from Spencer’s to breathe more deeply. Lookin’ at you #GenX!

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  Note: The flag photo used is an image of African American artist David Hammons 1990 dyed cotton art, African American Flag. Hammons merged two flags (the U.S flag and the Pan-African flag) to start a conversation about what the US flag means and who it speaks to…and for. I thought Hammons’ flag was an appropriate image to accompany a critique on capitalism. More on Hammons here.