The Fem Spot

January 8, 2009

In his autobiography Timebends, playwright Arthur Miller confessed that his true fear in life was not death, but insignificance. Perhaps that’s why one of his greatest characters – Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman – is obsessed with the uniqueness of his identity.

“I am not a dime a dozen!” Loman screams in defense of his specialness. “I am Willy Loman…”

I completed the coursework requirement for the master of arts in English literature with this trite observation, which – somehow – never becomes obsolete, probably because it is the universal human condition to want to fit in and stand out in the human collective simultaneously. It’s valuable to reiterate and explore this theme. But, once, a professor neither agreed with nor found interesting my feminist take on a similar theme in works by another writer and wrote to me – in alarming, indelible red marker no less: I often get the impression that you quote ideas or speeches but don’t fully understand them.

Ouch! (I admit to being a bit of a Malaprop: I love words…learn a new one every day…try them out and inevitably make mistakes.) That professor’s final verdict of my class performance reflected his narrow opinion of my intellect and looked nothing like Nathanial Hawthorne’s “scarlet letter.” Those words forced me to question my own identity. Am I a brilliant, or even moderately scintillating, writer? Does anybody think so? Should I find a new career objective?

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My mother works as a computer systems analyst for a large insurance company. Last week, she boxed up her desk and moved from one floor of the corporate office tower to another. She’s been with the company more than 20 years…yet all of her things went into a few boxes and it was like she was never there at all. She’d vanished without a trace.

Later, she told me how unsettling it was to look at that empty desk. It isn’t hers, it’s theirs. And who are they? Do they think of their army of workers as a collective number or do they understand that individual human beings work behind each gray desk in each musty cubicle?

A large – or even a small – company won’t remember you when you retire or even value the work you do during your tenure. It’s too difficult for it to keep track of your uniqueness. That’s why – when layoffs rear their ugly heads – there’s rarely subjective accounting for hard work and raw talent at play. Layoff artists in a bad economy often stick to the basics: quantifiable accounting of each employee according to seniority and salary.

Ideally, you have friends and family who value your specialness in all economic climates. But how long and how deep does that appreciation extend?

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My husband’s mother passed away about six years ago, and his father has since remarried. I’ve often urged my widowed mother to do the same, but not at the expense of remembering and honoring my father. If you have a keepsake to remind you of the spouse you lost, shouldn’t it be sacred to you? My father’s specialness can be found in a carved wooden sign at our childhood summer camp. Our family – my mother especially – has fought for the upkeep of that sign ever since my father last set eyes upon it. By day, he was a computer tech; but he was also a gifted carpenter, patient and steady.

My mother-in-law’s specialness can be found in her home. She and her husband built it together in 1976. She picked out the cabinets, wallpaper, carpet, wood flooring, doorknobs… She decorated, placed the furniture, and hung curtains. And until she died those six years ago, she paid off the construction loan and built financial equity in the property for their security in later years.

Christmas has just passed. I did not go to that house with my husband on Christmas day. His father’s new wife has redecorated. All that remains of my mother-in-law in that house are a 2×3-inch portrait of her in the corner of a room rarely used, her wallpaper in the dining room, her rose emblem doorknobs on sliding doors in the main bathroom, and her curtains – which do not match with the new choice of paint in the living room. She is all but erased, though my husband swears she is not forgotten. Certainly, he has not forgotten her.

I can’t say to them, “Won’t you move to make me more comfortable?” I asked them to reinstate the pictures of my husband’s childhood: little league games, building a snowman in the yard, first day of school, etc. The new wife told me “no.” “They’re never going back up,” she said.

Meanwhile, photographs of her grandchildren have found a home there.

It’s like the first wife/mother moved away…cleaned out her desk and just moved away. There’s no reverence for her ever having been there…at least none that I can see.

I don’t have the same feeling about my childhood home. All of our pictures still hang there and my mother has not remarried, despite my urging. I’d like my mother to downsize her home so that she doesn’t have to deal with the large yard, the snow in winter months and a hazardous, uphill driveway. When she does, she will take the pictures with her and they will have a new home too. Why does the alternative offend me so?

I look around my house. It is me…everywhere: my photo art on the walls, my choices in paints, linens, curtains, etc. It is wrapped up in my identity. If I am a writer and I write things (apart from my job) in my home, then my home is part and parcel with me. It offends me to think that my husband might live here with someone else after I die and that his new wife might take down all of things that are me. I hope he would move and remember this house as it was when I was alive, intact with all of my specific choices. Were circumstances reversed, I don’t think I could live here either. But there is very little here that I could desecrate causing me to forget who he was. I see him in other things, not in the house itself. Does the home mean identity only to those who hang pictures in it and arrange knickknacks on its shelves? Isn’t that usually the underpinning beneath a female identity?

Maybe my father-in-law sees himself in his garage where his tools hang and where he’s spent hours tinkering on cars. Maybe he can’t part with the garage and has bargained his first wife’s identity in exchange. His new wife has a right to identify with her home too…and so it is changed.

A friend told me I should get over it. She’d done the same thing years earlier when her father had remarried and given all of his dead wife’s jewelry to his new wife and step-daughters, including the engagement ring he’d first bestowed upon another. (I can’t help but imagine the macabre moment he pulled the ring from that dead woman’s fingers.) My friend’s mother had loved that jewelry. Shouldn’t it have gone to those who would look at it and remember the person who appreciated it most?

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My husband and I went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I found it comforting that the film’s Benjamin has an optimistic outlook on summing up life and identity. He doesn’t define his friends by their jobs – which is usually one of the first things people ask about when they meet you for the first time…as if the answer holds the key to your specialness: “I’m an insurance salesman.” “I work for the IRS.” “I’m a plumber.” “I style people’s hair.”

That’s not all you are. You are what you hear and see and the way you hear and see it. You are your own unique perspective.

How many of us grow up to fulfill our childhood career expectations of ballerina, President of the United States, fireman, movie star, etc.? If we allowed ourselves more than a temporary mourning period in which to watch these dreams float far away from the realm of possibility, we would be much depressed and unable to find joy in hobbies and daydreams. And even those who do achieve such monumental goals have other facets to their identities. (Did you know that actress Geena Davis placed 24th out of 28 semi-finalists for the 2000 Olympic Archery team?)

Benjamin sees – from his reverse-aging perspective – that some people are appreciators of music…or artists…

This man is a tattoo artist, though an “artist” nonetheless. Some people, notes Benjamin, recite Shakespeare. And some people dance.

If she falls and breaks her leg, is she any less a dancer?

If I get a “B” and an insult instead of an “A” and encouragement, am I any less a scholar?

I am working on a short documentary film about little girls who cut their hair and donate it to wig makers who then, in turn, donate the wigs to low-income sufferers of hair loss due to Alopecia and cancer treatment. My partner – who is a stay-at-home-mom and full time volunteer, in addition to many other things – announced to me that this film project is more important to her than to me because I have separate career aspirations. “No,” I said. “I am still a filmmaker even if nobody pays me to be! I can’t define myself only by what I do to pay my bills.”

Instead, I’ll take a lesson from Benjamin Button. Some people are excellent computer gamers. Some people take pictures of flowers and hang them around their house. Some people are passionate writers and critics, even if others don’t always agree with or appreciate them.

Some people write essays so that worrying they are insignificant, like Miller, is an evanescent disposition. Some people even write their Academy Award acceptance speech and recite it in their bedroom wearing flannel pajamas.