the shape of a family

My Mister and my girls, making Orange Juice in our kitchen

Recently I heard an interview on KPBS These Days with a couple of stay-at-home-dads. I only caught the tail end of the program, but as the wife to a mostly stay-at-home-dad, I desperately wanted to call in and discuss. Alas, I never made it to air, but it got me thinking about the traditional family structure, how so many of us in theatre ignore it, and how recent politics (think prop 8 ) have asked us if it even really matters anymore.

Last month I interviewed a guy for a bartending position at the Pub I manage and watched him slowly break down as he discussed why he was so desperately in need of a job. With two kids and a recent job loss, he was looking for anything to keep them afloat. “My wife had a great job, but I told her she needed to quit. I couldn’t take care of two kids! I need to provide!”

Wait.

So your wife has a full time gig with benefits AND you’re out of work, but you ask her to quit? Ultimately, after discussing this further, it came down to a matter of pride. In his world, it wasn’t OK for his wife to be the provider while he cared for their active kids. So, instead of hanging on to what they had (one full time job in this economy), he asked her to stay home while he hit the street to find a job fit for a man. One that could take months, if not years to find.

Um, I didn’t hire him. Not because the feminist in me was screaming (though she was very much ruffled) but because I knew this gig could not sustain his family & (if lucky) he’d soon be on to something that could. And I hate training people just to have them walk out the door.

It’s things like this that make me so happy to be in my marriage, with my Mister.

For our family, we’ve always been flexible and accommodating to the structural needs of our family as it stands right now. My Mister and I have traded places through the years, he carrying the full time gig while I stay home and nurse babies, me working outside the home full time while he drove kids to school and the park. It’s allowed us to grab onto the gig that is there, rather than the one that may show up later. It’s given us a unique perspective, knowing exactly what it’s like to be in the others shoes. But mostly, it’s allowed us to be the most fulfilled people AND parents we can be.

Working in the theatre allows this flexibility more than the average field, I suspect, though it’s not the most lucrative world in which to work. We’ve traded things for a lifestyle that allows us more time with our kids and while it can be sometimes difficult (I do like things, after all) I cannot imagine life another way.

How do you follow your family needs? Do you have a more “traditional” structure? Have you ever traded places with your partner? Where do you think the shape of a family is headed?

DIY

Production Manager Missy Bradstreet showing off her Wonder Woman Style at the Opening of “The Toughest Girl Alive”. Missy is full of moxie, an amazing mama and the kind of friend you’d want in your corner.

I used to work for a theatre company that had the mission to “tell good stories well”. There is nothing I adore more than a really good story, told in a beautiful, honest, emotionally connected, raw way. Granted, that’s not exactly what this company does, though back in the day that I was working for them, they did it more often then I feel they do now (now-a-days, you’re not going to see much “raw” on that stage, for instance). Their work now tends to lean a bit more commercial than I prefer, though is still some “good” stories told “well”, so they have not shied away from their mission.

When I worked with the now (mostly) defunct Sledgehammer Theatre, back when the stunningly talented Kirtsen Brandt was the Artistic Director, “raw” was all over that stage. The work we did there made me feel proud to put my name in the program and vital to the continuation of an artistic process. We missed big, sometimes, but the intentions lay more in producing art than in selling tickets; which I found immensely satisfying as a closet artist who has worked exclusively as an administrator for the length of my career.  We would gather on dark weekends to share ideas, train, push through to the emotion under the surface of a piece, fight and once, to have a shaman clean the ghosts out of the theatre (no lie). This, up until now, was the high point in my career as Sledge allowed me to pull all my values into a single place and work tirelessly towards an end I was deeply proud to present. Of course, it didn’t pay. And then I got pregnant and the “tireless” ran out. So I quit and made babies for a couple years (of which I am deeply proud).

Now I work for one of the largest theatres in town and while I can feel a great deal of pride about the product the company produces, there isn’t a lot of room to be connected to the process when you run the pub. That and the work they produce is a little too commercial for my blood, though immensely entertaining. Working there, I often tell people, feeds my family, but not my soul.

That’s where MOXIE comes into play.

At MOXIE, I feel like we get to tell amazing stories in surprising ways. Often, people assume this is a company with a deeply respectable budget. They assume, based on what they see on the stage, that our funding is well cared for. If I shared with you the actual budget, you’d be right to insist that nobody could produce this level of product with that little money. Nobody, that is, except someone with moxie, and that’s what this company has in spades. The commitment to the mission, “to create more diverse and honest images of women for our culture using the art of theatre” has never been so beautifully displayed, despite funding limitations. And being part of a feminist theatre has fed my soul in a way I didn’t even know it was lacking. As the mother of two daughters, I can show them what strong, powerful women can do, no matter what gets in the way or what we are told we cannot do. It’s heartbreakingly awesome and opens them to a world of options even I didn’t know they had.

Imagine what we could do with “real” money?

Seriously, I want you to imagine it. In the comments, tell me what you think MOXIE could achieve with a budget that allowed us to pay our staff for full time work. If enough of us get the vision flowing, we just might find a way to make it happen. Dream big, people; we’ve already shown that we are capable of more than anyone would suspect.

Babies R Us?

NPR took on one of our favorite subjects this morning. Here’s the tag:

Is the Workplace the New Babies R Us? Parents with newborns often face a stressful situation when it comes to work. For new mothers in particular, returning to work can mean a wrenching decision to leave a new baby in daycare or with friends or family. A small but growing number of companies are allowing – even encouraging – parents to bring their babies to work.

It’s a nice little spotlight on a big, big issue. Thanks, NPR.

But one small question… Why Babies R Us? Is that cute? Is it clever? 

I’ll be even happier when a major news outlet can address the issues facing the massive ranks of working parents minus the reductionist headline. Or at least without suggesting to the business world that their offices might get turned into color-coded superstore aisles filled with commerce-crazed moms and their toy-crazed toddlers. 

Is that just me?

Who’s Writing History?

Delicia came over for coffee today. That means that Milo didn’t nap, because, well, we’re loud.  At least, we get loud when we talk about gender and politics, which we often do, and not only with each other.  I actually managed to engage my chatty seat companion on the plane in a discussion of gender politics…on the red-eye, no less.  Yet another advantage to flying without the baby! 

The woman I met on the way to Boston is an art teacher, and, although she made it clear to me that she is not a feminist,  she does share my alarm at the extreme gender imbalance in the most lucrative and most highly publicized sectors of the visual arts. Furthermore, she confided that it is her personal experience that female artists are poorly represented even in wholly contemporary collections, and that deserving female artists are often left out of the art history curriculum altogether. 

I’d tell you her name except I don’t know it. We didn’t talk about anything except art and gender.

Is this an obsession?

Don’t answer that. 

While Milo was trying to sleep, Delicia was telling me about an NPR story I missed, in which Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a pioneering black female guitarist whose heyday predates Rosa Parks as well as Chuck Berry, is found to be unfairly forgotten by history and finally gets a headstone some thirty years after her death.

Hmm.

In response I shared my evolving experience of this scarifying book by Kathryn Joyce, which I wanted badly enough to buy in hardcover and am now about a third of the way through.

(I call this photo “Still Life With Biblical Christianity and Nursing Bra.”)  

The largely home schooling group of Biblical Christians Joyce studied for her book have an insular publishing industry through which they create their own materials for teaching American history. Why?  Because their version of American history is different from most everybody else’s. Oddly enough, seeing that tactic in black and white actually gives credence to what might otherwise be considered an aging or insignificant concern, that history is written by the victors and has been fudged by the sons of the victors and adapted to modernity by the grandsons of the victors. It makes you wonder if even today anybody knows how deep the rabbit hole goes.  

But change does occur. Sister Rosetta Tharpe got a headstone.

Delicia tells me that revisionist history reminds her that MOXIE’s mission is important. I don’t think I can accurately quote MOXIE’s mission here, but I know one of the other ladies can. Put it in comments if you’ve got it. I can tell you that we choose plays that “expand our idea of what is feminine.”   

If our idea of what is feminine still finds its lineage in a long line of writers without vaginas, then it probably could use some expanding. 

Have any of you been taught things that you later learned were inaccurate or heavily weighted towards someone else’s point of view?  Any popular myths you feel passionate about debunking?

The breastfeeding majority

The last week of conversations has me looking at just about everything through a lens of “normal” and “not normal.” This has to do with our next show, The Butcher of Baraboo, in which a Midwestern family practically becomes a circus act trying to contain their lively collection of skeletons. I’m fascinated by the way that the women of Baraboo, as well as women closer to home (at least the one sitting in this home) seem to sort the behavior of our sisters and friends into “okay,” “okay for her but not for me,” and “not okay at all.”  At least, that’s what we’d like to be doing. What I’m afraid of is that the last two categories have a very messy overlap.

A week or so ago I posted an article to my Facebook page called “The Case Against Breastfeeding.”

I should tell you that on the spectrum of American moms, I’m pretty far to the granola. I give birth at home, I didn’t circumcise, and my 19-month-old is still nursing. I’m looking forward to a tandem breastfeeding adventure when my second child is born sometime in May.

But I appreciated this article.

It was written by Hanna Rosin, whom I follow on the XX Factor blog at Slate Magazine. (She’s the one who did this stunt where she and her husband spent the whole day no more than fifteen feet apart, which I totally want to try.)  

In my opinion, and I think this is often true in this world of high impact page headers, the headline doesn’t accurately represent the article.  The actual text was about what I might call the breastfeeding mandate: the power of the collective to make you feel bad if you don’t “do the right thing for your baby,” or if, for some reason, you can’t.  Like, for example, maybe you’re a man.

Okay…no, the article didn’t shout out to male caregivers, that was extrapolation, but it did address the difficulty moms in some circles might feel in actually hearing their own voices over the sound of the collective breast pump.

I think conversations like that are important. I think that debunking absolutism can only help those of us who do want to breastfeed, especially those of us who want to breastfeed our two-year-olds in public, since some find that behavior teetering out of “okay for her but not for me,” and maybe headed for “not okay at all.”  I think that the more we recognize that babies thrive when they are cared for, and that parents are qualified to make informed decisions about how to care for babies, the more of a chance we have of spotting the things that really hurt kids, like poverty, violence and abandonment.

But now I’ve gotten a couple of emails regarding this “attack” on mother’s milk. I’m hearing a call to rise up and defend breastfeeding (as if we aren’t the majority), and it’s making me feel guilty about supporting the other side. 

Is it too much to hope that we can have a dialogue about empowered choices AND also be supportive of breastfeeding?  Or is this desire to empower female and male agency in early parenting just feeding the culture wars?  

Society and the Single Girl

Since I’m thinking about families again today, I’m moving up this comment by Jo Anne from a post about love. This is MOXIE Theatre’s Managing Director:

I have been experiencing the “do you have a boyfriend?” question when I go home to Texas since I was 19. Now it’s morphed into “are you married?” or “do you have a family?”

To which I used to give a meek, head down, “no, not right now,” which then became a defiant, confident “Nope” – loaded with all of the “and I’m perfectly happy that way, thank you very much, so please get off my back” that I could fit into that little word.

But, the best part was always the look of thinly veiled suspicion and pity that followed. Always leaving with that “wow, I’m a freak” feeling.

And, I think your point about that push/pull that happens between trying to assure ourselves that we are ok, and reconciling that with the fact that we really would LIKE to have a partner, is such a valid one.

I’ve often wondered what the solution is to feeling not quite right about being single. How do we let it be TRULY ok to be single – giving AS MUCH value to that life experience – as we do to families? Even in MOXIE – our emphasis is on supporting families – with very little outright validation to the single person. Not that I would necessariy change that – I think this is part of our purpose on this earth. I just have often wondered how, as a society, we could make change that gives value to the individual, even unpartnered. I’m not sure what that is, but I just wonder if we’d feel more comfortable and easy in our search for a partner, if we didn’t feel like there really would be something WRONG with going through life single. 

At yesterday’s design meeting for The Butcher of Baraboo, we discussed the violence that can be done to an individual by a group. A community (which is, of course, made up of individuals, and that’s where the theatre comes in) sometimes invalidates characteristics of an individual that threaten the values of the group.   This happens in conservative communities. And it happens in liberal ones.  See Noelle’s comment on the “normal” post for a personal example of liberal outsider-shaming. 

Is offering “support” to our singles another way to shame people into conforming, potentially at their expense?   And if so, how do we let it be “TRULY okay to be single?”

Thursday Inspiration

About Thursday Inspiration: The standard rehearsal week is Tuesday through Sunday. That means Thursday is the theatre-world hump day. On Thursdays I try to post something that encourages us all to get our luscious rear ends back to work. 

Here’s The Fund for Women Artists. 

Support Women Artists Now

Speaking of parents who kick butt in the theatre, it was Kirsten Brandt who first directed me to the Fund for Women Artists. Every two months I get a juicy “funding newsletter”  listing submission deadlines for grants, contests, residencies and festival submissions in theatre and film, with opportunities specifically for women specially marked.

I haven’t personally taken advantage of these wonderful lists, but I will. In fact, maybe script submissions is one of the “some day” tasks that I’m about to transform into a “this day” task.  In the meantime, I appreciate that every two months an unassuming little email says to me, “You really should be sending out your work.”

This month the Fund for Women Artists, ”a community of artists and allies dedicated to celebrating and supporting art that tells the truth about women’s lives,” is organizing the second international SWAN Day. That’s Support Women Artists Now Day, and it takes place March 28.  From Executive Director Martha Richards:  

On SWAN Day we celebrate our global unity and also the
unique individual voices of the women artists next door.
There are thousands of talented women artists all over the
world who are making wonderful contributions to their
communities year after year. SWAN Day is a day to recognize
and thank these women.

Please take some time to make a direct connection with
at least one woman artist on SWAN Day. Talk to her in
person, give her a call, write her a note, or send her a gift -
do anything that shows that you appreciate her creativity.
There is tremendous power in these simple acts of respect
and recognition, and they provide models of the supportive
attitudes and behavior that we want to spread around
the world.  

Lest we think that a whole day dedicated to women artists seems excessive, Dr. Martha Lauzen’s recent study of women in film might put things in perspective. The Celluloid Ceiling finds that only six percent of the directors associated with the top 250 films of 2007 were women, and 21 percent of those films had no women at all in the key creative roles of director, writer, cinematographer, editor, producer or executive producer. 

A significant majority of creative storytelling in America happens from the perspective of the white male. We’re so used to it we don’t even notice. 

What should we do to celebrate SWAN Day, MOXIE’s?  We already have a “Love Raising” event just a few days before. That’s the reading of Labyrinth of Desire on March 23rd. We’re already honoring the purpose of SWAN day by creating a delightful evening of theatre that features a bunch of women, including female playwright Caridad Svich.

 What else should we do? 

Feminist Theatre Mommy Blogging

I couldn’t help but wonder today, as Nick and I were cheering for Milo as he put small scraps of wood from the rapidly disappearing Sugar Syndrome set into the big plastic trash can at the edge of the stage…

Are there any other theatre companies at which an 18 month old gets to help with strike? And I don’t mean sitting in the house with mommy. I mean he actually helped.

Are there any other toddler moms who think it is good training to teach their toddlers to safely navigate a theatre full of big people breaking up masonite and hauling platforms?  

I know there are. 

Milo doesn’t think any of it is terribly odd. His day was a lot like any other day. The greatest trauma of the afternoon was over a stolen cookie, which he knew perfectly well was out of bounds. His biggest complaint was about the “noy” (that’s”noise”), from a binding screw gun, which is exactly what he says when I bring out the vacuum cleaner. And the sweetest moments of his day were of communion and communication with his loving parents and guardians and grown-up friends.

At MOXIE we’re more aware of our limitations than we used to be. We didn’t have kids at load in for this show. We learned on Bleeding Kansas that having all four of the under-five set running around is nothing less than annoying. And I personally have had to deal with the realization that sometimes my kid just isn’t up for it. Maybe it’s teething. Maybe it’s stranger anxiety or a burst of clingyness. In cases like that, both of us have to compromise. But we keep figuring out a way to get it done.

For the last few days I’ve been searching the blogosphere for MOXIE’s peers. We don’t have a list of links in the sidebar right now. I believe that this is not only bad blog form, but also a failure to participate fully in the culture of blogging. But I’m having a hard time knowing who to link. It isn’t a shortage of deserving blogs. There are hundreds of blogs that interest one or another of us in important ways. There are the political blogs, the theatre blogs, the feminist blogs, and the mommy blogs. And there are many blogs that combine one or another of those interests. Lots of mommy blogs talk about feminism. Lots of theatre blogs dabble in politics. What we can’t find is the conversation about theatre and parenting. 

Delicia and I were just chatting today about the phenomenon of invisible moms in the theatre. How is it that some people still think it is impossible for theatre people to have kids when so many of us have done it? The greatest obstacle for parents in the theatre is the bizarre myth that we don’t exist. If we don’t exist, then there never need to be provisions made for us. There will never need to be daycare at the theatre. There will never need to be a business model that supports artists who don’t want to travel. There will never need to be rehearsal schedules that allow us to be home in time for dinner. 

I participate in a couple of blog-universes. There are regular commenters who share passionate interest in certain issues, who may or may not ever meet each other face to face. We use the blogosphere to make our individual voices louder, by grouping them together. We learn that there are others who feel the same way, and we combine our forces towards the possibility of change. 

Are there other people in cyberspace who want to talk about parenthood in the theatre? Or theatre via parenting?  If you know of any, send them our way. We’ll link them. We’ll write about them. We’ll try to make the sea of invisible theatre artist parents into something more like a family.

Hot Mamas

With The Sugar Syndrome ready to open, and as our entire creative team puts the final touches on their performances, designs and direction, I am feeling very fortunate to be a part of MOXIE, and to be working alongside some of the most talented people in San Diego.

This last week, I’ve been thinking a lot about the moms in the company.   I’ve been watching our Director, our Artistic Director, our Stage Manager, our Production Manager and our Design Ambassador spending hours upon hours in meetings and in rehearsal… staying late to give and receive notes, when I’m sure sometimes they’d rather be at home… spending time with their husbands and snuggling their babies.  I think it really struck me last weekend, when our first Preview fell on Penny’s 1st Birthday, which happens to be on Valentines Day.  Watching Jen throw a birthday party in the morning and afterward move right into a tech rehearsal, and then a performance…

This is challenging work, folks, balancing one’s passion with partnership and motherhood.  Making sure each is receiving enough care and attention.  I wanted to take a moment to let the mommies know that your hard work… the joy you bring to it, and the sacrifices you make, are not going unnoticed.  I respect and honor each of you more than you know.

xoxoamy