Baby, it’s warm inside.

I mentioned recently that I’m cold.

It’s that time, that hunkering down and covering up time, that time when all the world seems still and sharp and withdrawn. Waiting.

That time when the people of the world eat.

I spent the vast majority of my day today at the kids’ school, making latkes. Making, and making, and making latkes, for 40 kids, and two teachers, in two separate classrooms, + extra, for whatever teachers might be drawn into the teachers’ lounge by the magnetic smell.

But I wasn’t the only one there.

There was the dad making pizza, his family’s entry in the bread unit (loosely defined) that the K-1-2 classes are doing right now. There were trays and trays of cookies and cakes and meringues and white chocolate-covered pretzels and more cookies and yet more, arranged around a note from the recently retired head of the lunchroom, telling the school’s staff how much she missed them all. There was the holiday luncheon (the only part of which I really registered was the pulled pork…. [which I can kinda still smell...]). There were the tamales prepared by the K-1-2 teachers themselves, another entry in the bread unit (loosely defined). The room and the entire school were fairly bursting with special, lovingly prepared food, each an expression of the very best of human interaction.

The days grow cold. We go inside, and feed one another.

It made me so happy to be there, warned of open oven doors and helped with things placed too high, chatting and looking for the dish soap, tasting and sharing and giving and getting, laughing about — nothing really. Just, you know: Laughter.

I felt held. I felt wrapped. I felt – warm.

At the end of my presentation in my daughter’s class, I asked if there were any questions. One little girl raised her hand: “Can I have hug?”

Yep – always. And maybe a bite to eat, too.

The babies’ mom.

I grew up middle class. We didn’t always have the money to match the label, but the values were solidly in the Great American Middle: Do your best, help others, dream dreams, believe in yourself. Work hard.

The oft stated, and always implied, corollary — at home, at school, in books, on the street, in casual conversation, everywhere, always — was never-wavering: If you apply yourself and plow ahead, You Can Be Anything You Want To Be.

And I have done that. I have done my best, always. I have helped others. I have dreamt dreams — though I will admit that they have been small. I have believed in myself, my skills, and my worth to the broader world. And I have worked damn hard.

But I am not anywhere near where I want to be — and I am (talk about the middle) 45 years old.

I rush to clarify: I speak only of my professional life. In my personal life, I hit the jackpot. Married to one of the best people I’ve ever met, mother to two of the others, living in a warm community and warmer home, both of which are marked by laughter and love and good conversation. I am so blessed, there are no words — at least none that are adequate to the task.

But, as a member of the highly educated, feminist-minded middle class, I came up not wanting just those things — those wonderous things — but also to work in a profession that meant something to me, and to which I had something to contribute. It was an unspoken assumption that while I might not get rich, I would surely be able to pay my bills with my natural talent and responsible work ethic.

LOL! As the kids say.

Here was my dream: To make a living by writing, with most of the work I produce going out under my own name.

And ta-daa! Here I am. Last September, after about 20 years of struggling in print media (with a three-year break for graduate school), I gave up on having my name on anything (the occasional signed book review that I still produce not being the result of any effort on my part, but rather the fruit of a relationship with an editor who is a truly peachy guy, and who, not incidentally, still has a budget).

And now, tonight, I am on the literal eve of my last day on retainer with a nonprofit for which I’ve worked since 2004. It’s a good-news story, really, in that small non-profit A is being absorbed by larger, more efficient nonprofit B, to the benefit of all — except me. Though I still do the occasional bit and/or bob of work for other organizations, I’m mostly just scrambling to find anyone who will hire me, at all.

These are first-world, luxury troubles of the first order. My husband is a software engineer — the metaphorical blacksmith of his day — and we are not ever going to go hungry. I have health insurance, and my children are whole and strong.

But there is something so painful, so essentially wrenching, to realizing that the one thing I wanted — the thing I was led to believe was not only possible but deserved — is not to be. (But I was led to believe…!)

There are things I could have done differently (probably many things). I could have come back to the US earlier. I could have skipped graduate school. I could have chosen not to work part-time and from home after my children were born. At any point, I could have gone for a salaried job rather than freelance. There are many, many outside forces that factor in my current predicament (just ask anyone recently laid off from a newspaper job), but I am not blameless in my failure to achieve what I want.

And the bottom line is just that: I have failed. I have failed to achieve what I worked for 20 years to achieve, and there’s really no point in pretending otherwise. And I am tapped out and broken. There is nothing left in me to try to find some new way, some new system, to make a go of it. I’m looking into teaching and museum work and writing for more nonprofits and PR firms and any number of other worthy directions, but Emily L. Hauser, wielder of pen and the truth? Short of a miracle of good will and good fortune falling in my lap, that’s apparently done.

And so (FINALLY) we come to my point:

How do I model this experience — this: I’m-middle-aged-and-not-getting-what-I-want, this: I-feel-sorry-for-myself-but-that-won’t-change-the-facts, this: no-one-told-me-that-working-hard-isn’t-always-enough — for my children?

I want to find a place of grace and acceptance (I want to not feel sorry for myself). I want to help them aspire, and yet prepare them for the possibility that they won’t succeed. I want to be hopeful but realistic, realistic but not fatalistic, loving and giving and not nearly as cheerless as I have been. So now, this is my struggle.

Something will happen. I have no idea what, but a cursory glance at human history and some basic math indicates that the sun will rise, the sun will set, and eventually, two + two will = a paycheck. I will figure something out.

But how I live my life between now and then, how mommy manages this transition, how I move forward, and the extent to which these changes do, or do not, affect my kids’ lives — that will be a lesson that they carry with them, as surely as I carried the assumption that hard work was all I needed.

I wasn’t able to get the career I wanted.

But meh — neither have a lot of people. What really matters is that I get the not-getting-it right.

Not who you love, but how.

Aaaahhhh!

The kids are quite a bit better (thanks for asking!) but the piles of work remain daunting — plus, remember that whole “my sister and I are off to shop for a wedding gown” thingie? The wedding’s tomorrow! And may I add a hearty: Whoo hoooooo! Love is a lovely thing, isn’t it?

So, um, yeah, not a lot of time for blogging today, either.

But it did strike me that on the eve of a state-sanctioned and socially acceptable exchange of vows, at the end of a week in which certain Americans were told, once again, that: “You know what? You don’t get those rights!,” the following piece might be appropriate. It ran in the Chicago Tribune two years ago in the wake of the Larry Craig case (can you believe it’s been two years already? But I digress!), but the truth is that it is just as applicable today as it was then.

In the words of Representative Patrick Murphy (D-PA), a leader in the fight against Don’t Ask Don’t Tell: “If you’re an American, you should believe in equality.”

So, in celebration of my lovely sister and her delightful fiance, and in honor of love in its many, many forms, I offer the following. May we soon see a day on which all Americans are free to marry whomever they may choose.

********************

A LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME

When love is branded as repulsive, gays find it hard to leave the shadows

By Emily L. Hauser
October 07, 2007

Do I want people having sex while I’m using a public bathroom? No.

As a woman, I’m less likely to suffer that particular creepiness than, say, my husband, but I don’t want it happening to him either – he does occasionally take the kids in there after all. There oughta be a law, and I’m glad there is.

But I can guess what led to the practice of looking for sex in public (yet hidden) places – and I know that some men (whether lawmakers like Sen. Larry Craig or the guy from the hardware store) feel they don’t have other options.

Although some of us have become used to (if not always comfortable with)two men holding hands, and although we laugh at campy stereotypes, and we honored “Brokeback Mountain,” the simple truth is that many American homosexuals continue to feel trapped and hounded by a society that defines them (not what they do, not their lifestyle, not their “agenda,” but them) as disgusting.

Anti-gay activists go on about “the children” or “Scriptures” to dignify their positions, but there is a revulsion in their protest, one that is not repudiated often enough. And every young man or woman at the edge of sexual discovery knows it, and to some extent, absorbs it. Whether they have the tools with which to reject it is another question.

Imagine growing up knowing that the gut-turning, joy-giving longing you feel for another person automatically marginalizes you. Imagine that look on your pastor’s face, your mom’s, your friends’ – that look that is reserved for bad smells and perverts. Only it’s you they’re looking at.

The fight against gay marriage is often compared to the old one against interracial unions, but again, we mistake its virulence. After all, the love a black man may feel for a white woman isn’t an integral part of his character; it’s coincidence. This is the wonderful woman he happened to find.

Gay men and lesbians, on the other hand, are told every day that every person they will ever love is a mark of their lesser humanity. That, indeed, the love they feel – the love – is repulsive.

Is it any wonder that some gay people, particularly those raised in communities and families who teach this kind of hatred as holy writ, do everything they can to hide their longings? Is it surprising that some of them throw their weight behind laws and regulations that would further demonize those longings?

Every time we learn of the “lewd conduct” of yet another conservative leader better known for years of anti-gay fury, we must recognize the protests they have led and laws they have sponsored for what they really are: Elaborate closets, built of self-loathing.
I don’t doubt that there are true perverts in the world – some of them even gay! – and that many people will continue to be titillated by naughty sex in nasty places. We will always need to legislate against creepiness.

But if we really want to stop dignified older gentlemen from approaching potential sex partners in hidden places, we need to start teaching impressionable young kids that they are OK no matter who they love.

It’s not whom you love, it’s how you love. And God knows that, even if we don’t yet.
———-
Emily L. Hauser is a freelance writer living in Oak Park.

© Chicago Tribune, 2007

Fragile.

Okee dokee then! Today, both kids were home sick. So, no serious blogging, and indeed, no time even to mine the depths of YouTube or Boing Boing…!

The good news, though: It’s not (in the words of my buddy dissolver) the Hamthrax. They have colds and ear infections and all will soon be well (in an aside: You know that you’re surrounded by flu panic when a cold/ear infection diagnosis makes you happy).

In the course of worrying about them last night, though, when they we were both pretty darn miserable and asking (asking!) to go to bed, I was reminded of the following piece that I wrote back in 2007. It ran in the Dallas Morning News, and I remember crying as I wrote it. Today it’s a cold, but someday, it’ll be something much bigger — and I won’t be able to do a damn thing.

***********************

Our children, so fragile

EMILY L. HAUSER

02:49 PM CDT on Sunday, May 13, 2007

When pregnant with my first child, I had the opportunity to ask my graduate school adviser if we might discuss “my future.” With a glance at my belly, he looked me in the eye and said: “Thirty years of heartache.”

To which story my aunt later responded: “Only 30 years?”

If I’ve learned nothing else since the birth of that baby nearly eight years ago, it’s that your heart always aches. Happy or sad, there are many days when the heart feels it must surely implode from the weight of emotion, not least of course, the intense and impossible need to Keep the Babies Safe.

Right now my husband and I find our little family to be bathed in the glow of blessed days. The children – a beautiful boy and girl – are healthy, smart and funny, and in addition to delighting their parents daily, actually love and enjoy each other, too. We are the family Norman Rockwell was thinking of all those years.

It is impossible, though, not to think that this golden time will inevitably end. Human experience indicates that a day will dawn on which our idyll is at the very least tarnished. The fear, of course, is that it will be shattered.

Like everyone, I know my fair share of parents whose children have been visited by tragedy. I think of my friend whose baby died at birth and the one who whose 10-year-old was shot in the head. I know a kind and patient man who lost his teenager down the hole to over-the-counter drug abuse and a warm and giving woman whose previously sunny son is now, at 22, in the grip of paralyzing depression. My grandmother buried my father when he was all of 35.

They are so fragile, these babies. So many things can go wrong, and at any moment.

Paradoxically, it is my rational self that blazes a trail for me down the road to fear. The cycle of life, human nature, acts of God – all act as constant reminders that nothing is forever, that everything, eventually, breaks, rots, dies. My children’s bones will one day lie in the earth, and there is no way for me to know that their end will not come far earlier than it should or that their days will not be filled with sorrow.

My absolute inability to keep them from harm takes my breath away. Limbs will break, hearts will break. Please God, not spirits. The maxim that joy is not complete without grief to shape it interests me not in the least – let their joy be shapeless, I think, but let it be joy.

And so it is tempting to see this time of blessing as a trick of the light, an ill-defined prelude to disaster. My siblings and I were struck by catastrophe before we could read or write, when cancer snatched our father from us as surely as it did from his mother; as I grew up, all happiness was, in fact, shaped by that grief. It is hard for me to stop.

But something about this boy and this girl who I hold so lightly, with so few tools or guards, has opened a place I couldn’t dream existed. Just as I have learned that the bittersweet ache never ends, so too have my children taught me that the heart can be quiet, and that the joy in a 3-year-old’s song and a 7-year-old’s hand is unending. That these things can never be lost, even if they are taken.

I curl around my daughter in her tiny bed and hold her warmth to my belly. I cover my son with the blanket he’s tossed aside, and watch his limbs stretch endlessly beneath it, an impossible length of boy. I pray that this time will never end. I pray for the strength to hold them when it does.

Emily L. Hauser is a freelance writer living outside of Chicato. Her e-mail address is elhauser@hotmail.com.