What You May Not Know About Health Care

Posted on January 26, 2012 by lisa

When in the early nineties I lived in Oxford , England, as the new mother of a six-month old, nurses regularly came to our flat for well baby check-ups. All of my medications and doctors’ visits and all those for my child were free for the first year of her life. My prescriptions averaged around ten dollars each, no matter how expensive they were. And I was only a temporary resident.

When I lived in France for two years about ten years ago, my prescriptions were uniformly 7 Euros each, which at that time was about the same in dollars; even the medication that costs close to three hundred dollars here in the United States. In both countries I received health care as good or better as I have ever received here. In France, I broke my foot and the treatment there was remarkable in how fast it got me, literally, back on my feet.

Now, back here in the United States where I have had health insurance for the past 27 years in the state of Virginia I haven’t been able, so far, to qualify for health insurance in the state of Georgia, to which I have recently moved. I am being denied due to the number of medications I take, a factor which I really didn’t consider when deciding to move, ignorant, as I was, that I would have to apply and be medically underwritten for insurance all over again.

Because health insurance does not transfer. Did you know that? I didn’t. Even if the company writes under the same name. Blue Cross of Georgia has no obligation to cover me even though Blue Cross of Virginia has covered me for years. Other companies I have contacted have given me the same answer. I may yet get coverage (the jury is still out) from one company although they will require a rider which will exclude the most expensive of my medications, an inhaler which I take for life-long asthma and which costs nearly $300 a month. That same inhaler, I might add, which was less than 7 dollars in France, and which, even with my current co-pay costs me $90 a month out of pocket. The individual policy I currently have, has a large deductible, too, and still costs me close to $600 a month. I have a friend who has cancer and whose husband had a stroke and they pay almost $3000 a month. Yet health insurance companies run as for-profit enterprises and fat-cat CEOs are banking millions off the checks of people who are betting against themselves, and millions more because they won’t insure anyone who might be a risk. None of the executives of large insurance companies makes less than $3 million a year and most of the big guys make far, far more than that.

I suppose I am lucky, though, that I have none of the conditions which would have excluded me from even applying for insurance. Although, supposedly children under 19 born with pre-existing conditions cannot be denied insurance, that doesn’t count for those over that age. If you look at the applications you will find that people with Down’s syndrome, those who have a history of bi-polar syndrome, anyone who has had a stroke or heart attack needn’t apply. If you have multiple sclerosis or other nerve diseases you cannot get coverage. If you suffer from fibromyalgia you cannot get insurance. If you have emphysema or COPD you cannot get coverage. If you have ever had a drug or alcohol problem, don’t apply. And of course if you take more than three medications, your chances are pretty slim. In fact, if you think you might be the kind of person who might need insurance, you are out of luck. Best be young and healthy and insurance companies are happy to take your money and — until the Affordable Care Act goes into effect — dropping or denying you should you actually need medical care. Yet medical bills are the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States, and a huge majority of those who do file had some sort of insurance.

Yet the Affordable Care Act which invokes the ire of Republicans leaves much out and even its best provisions do not even come close to approximating universal health care as can be found in much of Europe and Canada. Though it states that “For most plans starting on or after September 23, these rules stop insurance companies from imposing pre-existing condition exclusions on your children; prohibit insurers from rescinding or taking away your coverage based on an unintentional mistake on an application; ban insurers from setting lifetime limits on your coverage; and restrict their use of annual limits on coverage,” there is no provision that covers people like me who wish to get individual insurance in another state. While banks ran wild with derivatives, we financed two wars on credit and still we spend billions on those wars and billions more on subsidies for huge corporations and tax cuts for everyone, including the very wealthy, we still are unable to “afford” to do anything about insuring all of our citizens.

People, like me, self-employed, whose health care is not provided by an employer, and the many unemployed are still on their own to cobble together what they can afford, or go without. Under the Affordable Care Act, anyone with a pre-existing condition (which basically means anyone with any kind of serious illness or anyone who takes more than three medications) can qualify for a good policy through the government but only after he or she has gone without health insurance of any kind of six months. That means I would have to drop my Virginia policy and go uninsured — paying out of pocket for all my medications and praying that I don’t have an accident or come down with some horrible disease — before I can qualify. The clause that forces insurance companies to take those with pre-existing conditions won’t kick in until 2014. Until then I, along with many others, am out of luck.

I am not particularly unusual. I am a relatively healthy 55 year old woman. In fact, a doctor quite recently pronounced me in good shape. I eat properly and I exercise regularly. Nothing catastrophic has happened to me. Yet. (I need to knock wood on this, as my grandmother would say: “God willing.”) But because of my medications I am now just about uninsurable in a new state, despite my past insurance history. For twenty years, I had insurance through my husband’s employment; when we separated and divorced he was allowed to carry me for three years. Four years ago I applied for my own insurance through his same company and was given a policy (which, incidentally has gone up by nearly fifty percent). Two of the conditions I have now I had then. But I now take two other medications and that is two too many for an insurance company. I think it is a great irony that the top executives of the afore-mentioned insurance companies are, with one exception my age or older and, I suspect, take medications or have conditions that might make them uninsurable, too. In another universe. The universe of the ordinary man. Yet while Blue Cross CEOs’ pay goes up and up, their pool goes down and down. (This may change, in the future, now that insurance companies are supposed to use at least 80 percent of their monies to provide health care, but only time will tell.) I was told by one broker that Blue Cross routinely denies coverage to sixty percent of people who apply.

When I began applying for new coverage I was inundated with sales reps and emails touting their “affordable” coverage. Blue Cross sold me hard and assured me, on the phone, even after taking down my medical history, that I would get coverage. I was denied in an impersonal letter which came in the mail days after I had called about my status and told that they would not cover me. I still get emails pushing insurance but now I am smarter. I finally found a broker who seems to know her business (after two brokers told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was completely uninsurable) who may have steered me to a reputable company which, as I said, may cover me. This is after hours and hours of filling out essentially useless applications to companies who did not have the decency to inform me that they were mere salespeople and that the underwriters had all the power. And, according to my most recent broker, it doesn’t look good that I have been denied coverage. It’s a black mark that I have to disclose on all future applications.

This self-described “greatest country in the world” has a lot to answer for when its citizens can either not qualify for health insurance or can’t afford it if they can. The Affordable Care Act made some tiny inroads into a deeply broken system, and even those inroads the Republicans wish to repeal. Meanwhile, millions of uninsured people go to bed each night hoping nothing serious will happen to them, and millions more have to choose between paying for their medicines or paying for food. And millions of others are filing for bankruptcy to pay for past and present medical bills.

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Surfacing (with a nod to Margaret Atwood)

Posted on December 29, 2011 by lisa

I’m living in an alternate universe. Here I have no water view; it is cold and damp outside and not warm enough inside. There are dogs to be let in and out, dogs that make me wheeze. The cat doesn’t cuddle up to me like mine does. I sit and try to work on a small kitchen table where I can’t spread out my stuff because we will be using it for dinner later. In this alternate reality there is a 14-year-old girl who, even after 18 months isn’t sure she wants her dad seeing anyone, including (especially?) me.

After visits to friends and family on the way, I am here, to celebrate a holiday I don’t care about. There is a tree. This is not unusual—I have long been subjected to Christmas trees as none of the men to whom I was married were Jewish—but there have been several years without the fuss and bother of putting it up and taking it down. I have been on the road for more than ten days and I am weary and I miss the sunshine and the water and the view I have longed and fought hard for.

But this alternate reality is one in to which I have bought. And only sometimes does it jar and rankle. In the evenings, after work is done for both of us and we make a meal and share some wine and sit and watch an old television series about the end of the world as we know it this alternate reality seems very fine.

I guess I have often and always inhabited alternate realities. From the time I opened an abridged edition of The Little Princess and joined Sara Crewe on the streets as she bought a hot bun for a starving child, I have lived in worlds others have built. Maybe even before that, as I remember the writing of Lois Lenski and how I felt a shiver of familiar kinship with the Strawberry Girl. Most recently I have been deep in the America of the late 1950s with Stephen King, who, better than almost any writer I know, captures you whole and takes you wherever he wishes. And you willingly follow, not even bothering to pretend you are suspending disbelief.

I have created my own alternate realities, too. From the time I was a child of eight and attempted my first novel to the countless short stories that fell first from pen and paper, later typewriter and word processor where I tried to tell tales that were like my own but better or worse, depending on the demands of the tale. I have written memoir and I have spoken out about politics, and all of those pieces of writing have formed yet another place other than my own.

In my very fertile and sometimes overactive imagination I have had long conversations with people who have done me wrong , tried to soothe hurts, found the right thing to say hours, perhaps days, after the incident which sparked the mind’s dialogue. And too, I create alternate realities by waiting for things to happen: good and bad. I rearrange my life to accommodate visits from my children, which though brief now that they are grown and gone, necessitate a stopping, a re-starting, a slowing down to cherish the few days or hours I have with them.

What encompasses my everyday life is a series of slipping in and out of alternate realities. Perhaps that is why I am so fascinated by the possibility of them, by what King calls the strings that slip around the past, present and future, each of them elongated by each decision we make: who we choose to love, how we choose to spend our days, what meaning there is in what we say, even, perhaps, the mere way we step out onto the street.

In some of my other worlds, I am not a woman in my fifties with grown children who still struggles with each word she puts to paper. My children are babies still growing inside me with all the joy that is yet to come. In some of my other worlds I am not the daughter of a father who is dead and a mother who is crippled by dementia. My parents are still alive and healthy and I have been able to show them who I am and they have rejoiced in that. In some other worlds I am not even divorced. The marriage that began with such hope did not crumble into incoherence. In some other worlds still the people who I loved and who have died are just on the other end of a phone call. In others, I am more, or less, content. In some I have all the answers to all my questions.

I make up worlds because that is the only thing I know how to do well. And because it is the only thing that makes the reality of my own lovely universe make sense. I see the alternate realities around me as part of the fiction that is life itself. Parsing it is painful but necessary.

Leaving a novel is like leaving a place where you were whoever the author wished you to be. You buy into the vision and you are taken for the ride of your life, if only for a few days. For those days you stay up far later than is wise, snuggled deep beneath the covers, the light over your shoulders your only connection to the reality that is outside the world a writer has created for you. Coming out of that world is like surfacing from the deep. You gasp for air, you look around, and yes, there are the dogs clamoring for attention, the dinner to be made, the evening to be spent and the small, sad moment when you realize that tonight you won’t have that world in which to escape. It is like every good-bye to every alternate reality into which you step.

Leaving one world for another is no easier than putting down a cherished book. Each time I slip from place to place, from time to time, from moment to moment, a fissure opens, a string pulls, I surface down the road again, sighing with both pain and joy, another trip into another world for another small amount of time.

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My Cooking Ambivalence

Posted on December 15, 2011 by lisa

As I poured the remains of the Thanksgiving Day cranberry relish down the garbage disposal, I suddenly understood why people don’t like to cook. Weeks after the day I spent making homemade cranberry relish, two from-scratch (including the crust) pies, a turkey, mashed potatoes, noodle kugel , fresh haricot vert with sautéed almonds, I found the relish in the back of the fridge. It reminded me that I had spent the better part of two days making a meal that my children and boyfriend and I had eaten, even with spirited conversation, in about an hour. Sure, I made turkey tetrazzini with the leftover meat, and yes many of the other leftover things got pretty well consumed over the next few days, but I still dumped half a pie, a third of a kugel and that cranberry sauce.

I like to cook. For twenty years, without fail, I put a fresh-made supper on the table for my husband and children at least five and usually six nights a week; on the odd night we went out, or brought food in. I did not use frozen ingredients, I did not resort to cans. After a few years I really knew what I was doing with planning and could get a meal on the table in well under an hour. I was also one of those mothers who, after nursing each child for a year, transitioned to only organic milk for the next two, made my own baby food in a mill or food processor, and was adamant about fast food and sugar being very special treats. My kids grew up to be pretty good eaters, although my daughter now challenges me to learn vegan cooking. We had wonderful dinner hours full of sharing and conversation. Yet what I remember clearly is that most nights, as I was cooking, one kid or another would come into the kitchen, ask what was for supper, and roll his or her eyes when I told them the menu. I finally had to banish them from the kitchen and the question until they could learn to ask without offering a negative opinion.

It made me a little nuts, but I kept on cooking.

When my husband and I divorced and my son went to college, my daughter and I found ourselves making sort of pick-up meals; a salad, perhaps, with some popcorn chicken from KFC. Too often we would eat in front of Gilmore Girls reruns. On those nights, my 12 year old daughter looked at me, smiled and said “I like how we eat now that we are divorced.”

I should have felt guilty but I felt relieved. I felt like I was on holiday.

A few years later, re-married, I once again began the every-night-dinner thing. But I found myself balking at it more and more. Why couldn’t he cook? Why did I have to come up with something creative each evening? Why was I sliding back into the pattern I had been happy to get out of for awhile? I had no answers, I did little soul searching. I just cooked.

Now divorced again, I cook only rarely: when I have company, when my boyfriend is visiting or I am visiting him, when my kids come to stay. It feels a little different. As though it is my choice, not my responsibility. But the truth is I struggle with it the same as I always did. As I cooked and baked my way through the holiday, I felt a simmering resentment that all my work would be gone in an instant, that I would have to deal with leftovers for days, and that, really, would it all be appreciated? I think it was, but would the time spent with my family have been just as lovely had I gotten a pre-made dinner from Fresh Market? Who knows?

My boyfriend, the divorced father of a teenage daughter, pours over cookbooks at the beginning of week that his daughter will be living with him. He peruses recipes, writes out the ingredients for them, checks the pantry for what he does and doesn’t have, and writes a grocery list. He posts the week’s menu on the refrigerator. He will even get out of bed a half hour early in the morning just to chop and prepare things to put into the slow cooker he uses a couple of times a week. He relishes the leftovers, which he carefully packs for his lunch during that week.

But on the weeks when his daughter isn’t with him, he admits to pick-up meals, too: an old leftover perhaps, a sandwich, chips and salsa, a frozen pizza. Like me, he knows that cooking for one isn’t much fun. So, even though cooking doesn’t cause me anxiety– and I can put together a decent fresh meal from the pantry and fridge in under a half hour–I do understand that the drudgery of cooking every evening, after a long day of working or taking care of children, can unravel people. And the mess is an issue if you are standing at the sink at eight o’clock doing dishes. I get it, I do.

Yet I persist. I remember that as a divorced woman in her fifties my mother lived alone and for many years cooked for herself. She might make a whole batch of chicken breasts one evening and eat them through the week, but she fixed healthy meals for herself and she kept food in her refrigerator. It was the lack of her shopping and cooking, the empty fridge and pantry that first signaled to my sisters and me that there was something wrong with our mother. Months later her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s confirmed it.

I don’t imagine that my continuing to cook, even sporadically, will prevent me from coming down with her disease. I don’t imagine that anyone will give me a reward for my good cooking or even that, at this point, cooking for myself will keep my weight where I want it to be. I can’t even promise that I will cook for myself on a regular basis. What I do know, though, is that cooking for other people remains a way for me to show them I love them. And no amount of dumped cranberry sauce is going to stop me from doing that.

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Love’s Labors Lost?

Posted on November 29, 2011 by lisa

My 18-year-old daughter who is a freshman in college texted me the other day that she had a date for Saturday night. I texted her back that I thought college kids didn’t date. She replied that yes that was true and she had been complaining about it just the other day, when lo and behold she got an invitation to dinner out with a boy she knows. As far as I know, this is her first date since going off to school in late August, although she had been to the requisite number of parties and “hung out” with young men and women of various sexual proclivities. She was psyched. I laughed, but so was I.

My son, who is 24 and also in school, hasn’t had much luck with women lately. Although he had a fairly serious relationship with a great young woman a couple of years ago, distance and other things broke them up. Since then, he has seen a couple of women, but none of them seem quite right, he says. What he would really like is to fall madly, completely in love. He’s a romantic that way. The bad thing is that he isn’t even dating much: what with school and work his time is limited; he knows that but still he longs for that big love.

I thought about my kids when I read Charlotte Alter’s poignant Modern Love column about how hard it is for her generation to date, find love, have romance, all the things she envies in women of my generation. She fears that her generation has forgotten how to love.

If my own children are any example, I don’t think the younger generation has forgotten how to love as much as they just aren’t sure how to go about getting it. There is the fact that casual hook-ups seem the norm and manners are deeply distrusted as somehow being inauthentic. But more than anything, I think my generation, the baby boomers, may bear some responsibility for our children’s disaffection with love.

We fought hard for equality; some of us so much that we wouldn’t allow men to open our doors, carry our bags, or pay for our dinners. We began to make love with the kind of fervor and abandon that had, previously only been the privilege of men or “loose” women. “Good” girls didn’t have sex right away, and certainly not unless they had a steady boyfriend. But by the time I went to college in the early seventies all that had changed. I had steady boyfriends with whom I had sexual relationships, but it was clear I didn’t have to have a boyfriend to have as much sex as I wanted, and sometimes I did. In addition, the term “slut” no longer had the kind of power to hurt women as it once had. We were emancipated, we were free women; we could major in anything we wanted, go to college, be whatever we chose to be….and we could sleep with whomever we chose, too.

But the thing was, there was still romance. Men still invited me out on dates, thought up interesting things to do, and paid for my dinners and events, mainly because back then they made a whole lot more money than I did. And my men were sweet and kind and faithful and endearing, almost to a man. I have love letters, and dozens of memories of extraordinarily romantic gestures from all of my serious relationships, from a man, who when we were out walking, bought me a new pair of shoes because my feet hurt, to another who swept me away for weekends. Like the mother of writer Alter, I can regale my kids with stories of the men I have loved and who have loved me, including their father. I have been lucky in love, even if my marriages have not lasted a lifetime.

But until my latest relationships, I didn’t have the internet to contend with, the easy availability of pornography and on-line encounters. I didn’t have to contend or compete with explicit television shows where sex was as easy as buying groceries. I didn’t have to worry about the bombardment of images of women to which I could not even hope to complete. There was the telephone, landed, the mail where real letters were sent and received. No texting or messaging, no distractions during dinner or dancing or sex. When you were with a man he was with you, not gazing at a variety of devices that offered him other options.

Just because I am a feminist and believe that men and women should be equal in the marketplace in terms of salary and opportunity, doesn’t mean that I don’t think the niceties of dating shouldn’t be observed. Plans should be made in advance, the romantic gesture, whether it is a home-cooked meal, flowers, the planning of a trip, should be observed. By both parties. But what has happened in response to feminism’s push for equality between the sexes is the same kind of backlash that Frank Rich writes about in his most recent article for New York magazine: violence has erupted. Just because charges can now be pressed against abusing men, even if the woman recants (something so recent I remember the day in Virginia when the law changed), doesn’t mean domestic violence has lessened. Just because women can have sex doesn’t mean that they won’t still be punished for it. Judges will throw out rape charges based on a woman’s “reputation” and the way she dresses, forty years after we began to push for change. Misogyny abounds: from many of our candidates for office, from the men who run our country’s banks and businesses. Why else would Obama have had to pass the Lily Ledbetter law just three years ago?

We have “won” the right to speak our minds, get out from under the thumb of men (both literally and figuratively). We have won the “right” to have sex like a man, to take as many partners as we wish, but with that freedom has come brutality, disease, violence and fear. Automatic respect for womanhood is long gone, but what has taken its place? Images of women we cannot imitate but which experts believe is badly affecting the expectations of lovemaking; easy hook-ups which leave most women I know who have had them feeling empty and lost; and a disaffected youth who isn’t sure love will ever find them.

I wouldn’t trade the experiences I have had for anything; I would never wish to go back to the way women were treated in the last century. But as far as we have come, there is still so far to go. Men and women need each other. They need to believe in love and its possibility and they need to go out of their way to be kind and generous and romantic about it, all while remembering that each of us is to be treated respectfully and honorably. And it wouldn’t hurt any of us women to be honest about what it is we really want before we tumble into bed with the next attractive stranger.

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Despicable Behavior: But is it Harassment?

Posted on November 7, 2011 by lisa

I have been trying to dissect two stories that have come across my desk (or, perhaps I should say my computer) the past couple of days.

In one, a youngish blogger is in the middle of a brouhaha that involves a man asking her to his room as they rode an elevator together at four in the morning and includes the comments of, are you ready for this? noted philosopher and atheist Richard Dawkins. The basic assumption of both Ms. Watson and the men who wrote about her was that she had been the victim of what could have been a sexual assault. The other story is a report in the New York Times, and widely reported elsewhere, which claims that there is widespread sexual harassment of children in grades 7 through 12.

While I am appalled at the sexual propositioning or harassment of anyone, male or female, I am not quite sure that any of the incidents in the two stories constitute what it seems is a clear definition of sexual harassment.

To begin, The EEOC (the Equal Opportunity Employment Comission) states that “sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964” and is “Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitutes sexual harassment when submission to or rejection of this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual’s employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual’s work performance or creates an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment.” More about that can be found here. But what happened to Rebecca Watson in the elevator at the conference she was attending was not sexual harassment. It was an unwanted, sleazy, and unsettling advance that she quickly put to rest. It was only in the reporting of it, by her and others, that the issue took on another light. The revelation by Watson, made on a video blog was written about in another blog, and, somewhere around comment #75 out of more than a thousand, long comments, Dawkins takes Watson (although not by name) to task. The gist of his comment is that compared to the horrible things happening to women around the world, her whine is, well, silly. His main defense, when pressed, was that Muslim women (in specific) suffer from misogyny.

There, of course, his argument breaks down. Because while what Ms. Watson was the victim of was not sexual harassment or even, really, sexual assault. She was propositioned, and she felt uncomfortable and nervous. What she was really the victim of was indeed was misogyny, misogyny that, although slightly on the wane, is born out of classic male privilege. Male privilege may lead to sexual assault and it may well lead to sexual harassment as it has done in the cases of the now four women who have accused presidential contender Herman Cain, but it is just as often an outmoded notion of patriarchy. Women who are on the receiving end of male advances should not and must not call them all sexual assault or harassment. If that happens then the real issue of both will neither be properly defined nor properly punished. Ask any rape victim who still has to prove that she wasn’t asking for it. Hell, ask Anita Hill.

It doesn’t seem to hold water that the behavior talked about in the Times article is sexual harassment, either. Rather, it is a virulent form of bullying which often stems from the same kind of male privilege. Although the American Association of University Women, a nonprofit research organization, defines harassment as “unwelcome sexual behavior that takes place in person or electronically,” according to the Times, in fact, every dictionary of note defines sexual harassment as something that takes place more specifically in the work place. It is, by those definitions, an issue of a power struggle between the harasser and the harassed and usually results in economic or job-related consequences. See what happened in the Herman Cain results. See the fear that women in the work place have of reporting sexual harassment for fear of being fired or denied promotion. Witness the fact that the women who accused Cain are being vilified as liars.

This is not to say that sexual taunts or unwelcome advances among schoolchildren are not issues worth disclosing and remedying. But ugly jokes, touching, name-calling and the like are aspects of bullying, which, according to most studies is now rampant. Calling someone a “whore” or “gay” is not sexual harassment: it is a form of tyranny: misanthropic and misogynistic. It is also an outcome of low self esteem, insecurity, and a desire to make one look cool. Bullying is often done by groups of children and young adults; it can be carried out by mean girls as well as mean boys, and as one who was bullied as a middle-school girl, it can be torture. But I can in no way equate it with the sexual harassment to which I was subjected while working as a journalist. That harassment, more than thirty years ago, had no name back then. And as a young reporter and writer I thought I had to grin and bear it, just as I had tried to do with the bullying years earlier.

Richard Dawkins was wrong to make light of what happened to Ms. Watson but he put his finger on the crux of the issue of harassment. We cannot tar all actions, no matter how much they speak of misogyny, with the same brush, just as involuntary manslaughter is not the same crime as pre-meditated murder. Ugly and brutish behavior toward women, behavior that sexualizes them whether they wish to be or not, is not cool. Institutionalized oppression is a whole other bag of worms. Unlike many countries who have laws against women’s equality, we have a few (although not nearly enough) laws on the books which support women. But because the hundreds and hundreds of comments on both blog sites were all over the place, it is clear we have a long way to go to educate ourselves and our society in how to properly behave.

I am a feminist and have been for most of my conscious life. In no way do I minimize male privilege, the privilege of power, or the fact that, whenever they think they can get away with it, the so-called strong of both sexes will always take advantage of the so-called weak. Misogyny, bullying and privilege of any kind that results in our demeaning others in any way have got to stop. If we try and stop bullying, sexual or otherwise, in our schools, perhaps we won’t have as many women having to fend off the unwanted advances of men. But, most importantly, perhaps we will have work places where women and men can work alongside each other without fear that their superiors or co-workers will make it impossible for them to make a living. Calling things that are not sexual harassment diminishes the horror that is sexual harassment. We clearly need to start a lot earlier in our campaign to equalize the sexes in terms of their treatment in society in general. Only in that way can we more clearly define, an prosecute, what constitutes sexual harassment in the work place.

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At 50, Finally Telling the Truth

Posted on October 25, 2011 by lisa

I was into my 30s before I began to tell the truth. I hadn’t exactly been lying in the three previous decades; but what I had been doing was, at best, dissembling, and at worst, well, let’s say I was avoiding the truth. And all the while I had no real idea I was doing it.

I come from a family of liars. We didn’t know or tell the truth about my mother’s illness, which still to this day has never been properly diagnosed but must have been some form of bipolar disease; we didn’t talk about her drinking either. We didn’t discuss why my father was so willing to allow his three daughters to be raised by a woman who could, on many days, barely get out of bed. We didn’t know about or talk about the strains of melancholia, of outright madness, that ran through both sides of the family. My grandmother had “dementia,” not something real and more terrible: Alzheimer’s, the disease that would also capture my mother. We did not discuss my middle sister’s peculiar personality, or the way my little sister adopted my father’s “don’t worry, be happy” mantra, all the while the family crashed and burned around her.

We talked about art and books and the theater. Politics and religion were even on the table. Not sex, of course; no one talked about sex. And certainly not emotion. Emotion was completely taboo. We were simply to pretend not to notice my mother’s unforgiving behavior, my father’s distance. For years and years any attempt I made to bring up the past was squashed. I was considered high strung, emotional, for even asking about emotional issues. I persevered, in a way. Until, in therapy soon after the birth of my first child, I finally began really telling it like it was. I began to unravel the huge ball of lies that my family had so artfully and so consciously woven over the years.

But it wasn’t until I turned 50 that I finally learned how to really tell the truth.

I thought about all of this recently as I listened to author Rosemary Daniell read from her latest essay. This is a woman who was telling the truth long before it was fashionable. Fatal Flowers, Daniell’s first memoir, published in 1981, rocked my world. Wow, women not only had sex, they could write about it. And they could write about madness and womanhood and relationships and pain with gut wrenching honesty. Yet, it would be another twenty years before I even began to attempt that journey myself, and it wasn’t until I published Desire: Women Write About Wanting, in my fifty-first year, that I let myself really speak out loud the truths of my life. I had long been a writer, of both fiction and nonfiction, but it was clear that my fiction had disguised the truths I wrote about, in order to make them more palatable. In my nonfiction, I began to actually put myself on the page: with no disguises.

Some of the truths I have begun to write about have gotten me into trouble. In a conversation with Rosemary, I mentioned that writing about my relationship with my father, a few months before his death, had set my sisters against me and begun the long forced march toward our current estrangement. She cocked an eyebrow and looked at me. “Truth doesn’t make a good relationship bad,” she said, “but it might reveal the depth of a bad relationship.”

I felt a little stunned. For twenty years my sisters and I had been trying hard to forge a close and loving relationship with each other, partly against our weird and heartbreaking upbringing, partly just because. But perhaps Rosemary was right. In telling the truth, my truth about the difficulties I had had over the years in making a connection with my father, I had revealed just how fragile the underpinnings of my relationship with my sisters had been all along. A few trips back to my original therapist after my father’s death and the estrangement had revealed a similar truth, but I had obviously been reluctant to accept it. He told me that clearly I had always been the one in the family who tried to insist that the emperor really was naked, even as, over the years, I had begun to doubt the veracity of that fact myself.

Yet I do not regret learning to tell the truth. While I don’t think that every truth we have need be spilled on a page, I am a writer. And part of my truth-telling is writing about it. But part of my truth-telling also lies in the comfort of (very) late middle age. Now, halfway into my fifties, I have had to both tell and accept some brutal truths about myself and others. With the wrinkles and the failings of my body has also come the liberation of transparency. Telling the truth, like any act of courage, is a risk. But it is a risk that I am more than glad to take. We get very little time on this earth and to waste it either telling lies or believing in them is a terrible shame.

The past half dozen years have seen the publication of my first book and the dissolution of two marriages, one of more than twenty years. It was only because I finally understood how much of the truth that I was hiding that I was able to let my first relationship end, and, oddly enough, to accept the wondrous, if brief, marriage to my second husband. During those same six years, my son got into terrible trouble, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and my father succumbed to his very long and hugely debilitating illness. My son got back on this feet, my daughter has now gone to college and I have relocated to live by the ocean, a long held desire. It has been a grueling, growing, tumultuous half decade, but had I not learned to tell the truth, had I not learned how important honesty was in all fronts, I never would have made it out alive. Not unscathed, of course, but alive. And I retain the hope, always, that by telling the truth, real truths will be revealed. That transparency is to the good of all of us.

(This post originally appeared in the Huffington Post)

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There is Beauty in Truth

Posted on October 23, 2011 by lisa

I was into my thirties before I began to tell the truth. I hadn’t exactly been lying in the three previous decades; but what I had been doing was, at best, dissembling, and at worst, well, let’s say I was avoiding the truth. And all the while I had no real idea I was doing it.

I come from a family of liars. We didn’t know or tell the truth about my mother’s illness, which still to this day has never been properly diagnoses but must have been some form of bipolar disease; we didn’t talk about her drinking either. We didn’t discuss why my father was so willing to allow his three daughters to be raised by a woman who could, on many days, barely get out of bed. We didn’t know about or talk about the strains of melancholia, of outright madness, that ran through both sides of the family. My grandmother had “dementia,” not something real and more terrible: Alzheimer’s, the disease that would also capture my mother. We did not discuss my middle sister’s peculiar personality, or the way my little sister adopted my father’s “don’t worry, be happy” mantra, all the while the family crashed and burned around her.

We talked about art and books and the theater. Politics and religion were even on the table. Not sex, of course; no one talked about sex. And certainly not emotion. Emotion was completely taboo. We were simply to pretend not to notice my mother’s unforgiving behavior, my father’s distance. For years and years any attempt I made to bring up the past was squashed. I was considered high strung, emotional, for even asking about emotional issues. I persevered, in a way. Until, in therapy soon after the birth of my first child, I finally began really telling it like it was. I began to unravel the huge ball of lies that my family had so artfully and so consciously woven over the years.

But it wasn’t until I turned fifty that I finally learned how to really tell the truth.

I thought about all of this recently as I listened to author Rosemary Daniell read from her latest essay. This is a woman who was telling the truth long before it was fashionable. Fatal Flowers, Daniell’s first memoir, published in 1981, rocked my world. Wow, women not only had sex, they could write about it. And they could write about madness and womanhood and relationships and pain with gut wrenching honesty. Yet, it would be another twenty years before I even began to attempt that journey myself, and it wasn’t until I published Desire: Women Write About Wanting, in my fifty-first year, that I let myself really speak out loud the truths of my life. I had long been a writer, of both fiction and nonfiction, but it was clear that my fiction had disguised the truths I wrote about, in order to make them more palatable. In my nonfiction, I began to actually put myself on the page: with no disguises.

Some of the truths I have begun to write about have gotten me into trouble. In a conversation with Rosemary, I mentioned that writing about my relationship with my father, a few months before his death, had set my sisters against me and begun the long forced march toward our current estrangement. She cocked an eyebrow and looked at me. “Truth doesn’t make a good relationship bad,” she said, “but it might reveal the depth of a bad relationship.”

I felt a little stunned. For twenty years my sisters and I had been trying hard to forge a close and loving relationship with each other, partly against our weird and heartbreaking upbringing, partly just because. But perhaps Rosemary was right. In telling the truth, my truth about the difficulties I had had over the years in making a connection with my father, I had revealed just how fragile the underpinnings of my relationship with my sisters had been all along. A few trips back to my original therapist after my father’s death and the estrangement had revealed a similar truth, but I had obviously been reluctant to accept it. He told me that clearly I had always been the one in the family who tried to insist that the emperor really was naked, even as, over the years, I had begun to doubt the veracity of that fact myself.

Yet I do not regret learning to tell the truth. While I don’t think that every truth we have need be spilled on a page, I am a writer. And part of my truth-telling is writing about it. But part of my truth-telling also lies in the comfort of (very) late middle age. Now, halfway into my fifties, I have had to both tell and accept some brutal truths about myself and others. With the wrinkles and the failings of my body has also come the liberation of transparency. Telling the truth, like any act of courage, is a risk. But it is a risk that I am more than glad to take. We get very little time on this earth and to waste it either telling lies or believing in them is a terrible shame.

The past half dozen years have seen the publication of my first book and the dissolution of two marriages, one of more than twenty years. It was only because I finally understood how much of the truth that I was hiding that I was able to let my first relationship end, and, oddly enough, to accept the wondrous, if brief, marriage to my second husband. During those same six years, my son got into terrible trouble, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and my father succumbed to his very long and hugely debilitating illness. My son got back on this feet, my daughter has now gone to college and I have relocated to live by the ocean, a long held desire. It has been a grueling, growing, tumultuous half decade, but had I not learned to tell the truth, had I not learned how important honesty was in all fronts, I never would have made it out alive. Not unscathed, of course, but alive. And I retain the hope, always, that by telling the truth, real truths will be revealed. That transparency is to the good of all of us.

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You Might As Well Jump

Posted on October 20, 2011 by lisa

When my son was six years old and my daughter six months old my then husband and I moved to Oxford, England for his sabbatical year. I mentioned our trip to an acquaintance who appeared shocked. “I wouldn’t take my six month old to the supermarket, let alone a foreign country.” I had supportive friends and family, yes, but there were more nay-sayers than not. Even as recently as eighteen years ago, well meaning people asked me if it was okay to eat the water and drink the food in England. Others shook their head and told me it rained all the time.

It was a risk to move a young family overseas for a year, to enroll my son in first grade in a foreign country, to learn how to drive on the “wrong” side of the road, to navigate the laws and mores of an unfamiliar place. But despite the fact that the four of us lived in a tiny, two bedroom flat with minimal furniture, despite the difficulties of making friends and wheeling a stroller while shopping for dinner, and yes, despite the rain, it was a glorious year. So glorious, that when my family was given the chance, several years later, to move to Paris for two years, we all jumped at it. This time we lived in a country where, save for my children’s father, none of us spoke much of the language. Again, we lived in a flat much smaller than our house, and again the children, both of them this time, had to attend a new school. But we thrived. All of us. The rewards of the adventure far outweighed the risks, even in times of stress.

I value risk. I think stepping outside one’s comfort zone is one of the healthiest and most interesting things a person can do. While I realize that some people are inherently risk averse, I suspect that most all of us, given the chance at taking a risk, even a small one, would find that it opened up our lives in new and unexpected ways. I suspect that even the risk adverse might find that taking one is a good thing.

Last week, while listening to Radio Times on National Public radio, I heard a group of explorers, adventurers, being interviewed by the host. They were discussing huge risk taking: climbing Mt Everest, walking over glaciers, the kind of risks that even the most adventurous of us shy away from. But one of the explorers made a very good point, when asked if people could get a feeling for such an adventure by following along with it on You tube, where some of the men interviewed had filmed their climbs live. He said he supposed that it was one way to experience a risk, but he advised against doing only that. He admonished parents to allow their children to experience risk in childhood, in order to better prepare them for the realities the world will later present. He took exception to the way children today are coddled, protected, kept safe from anything that might present a risk. And he stated that it was the duty of parents not to raise their children without any exposure to risk.

By living and traveling in foreign countries my children, now nearly grown, were exposed to lifestyles and cultures that both surprised and reassured them. They learned to maneuver terrain as unfamiliar to them as a mountaintop would be to me. They gobbled up experiences like the new foods to which they were introduced. And I know that those travels, those exposures, are the reason that both of them felt comfortable leaving home for college, that both of them are avid and interested travelers, and that both of them are not afraid to try something new. I am glad that I was on board with packing us all up and trading our lives for another.
It is neither easy nor simple to leave the peace (or even the boredom) of the unfamiliar. I realize that fear plays a part in all of our lives, often preventing us from doing something that may well profoundly change us. But without risk, what is a life?

I don’t mean, of course, that everyone should go live in a foreign country, or even travel to one (although were it financially possible, it might do a lot to tamp down America’s rampant xenophobia). But there are small risks that anyone can take: read a book by an unfamiliar author or break out of your genre rut, listen carefully to someone else’s political position without prejudice; venture to an unfamiliar part of town, taste a food that frightens you, befriend a stranger, consider a different job or career (one that, perhaps, tests skills you wish you had), fall in love, move house, pay close attention to something in which you think you have no interest. Anything you do to break out of what is your safe and easy place can only open your eyes to a wider experience in general.

More magazine devotes a section in every issue to women who take risks late in life. There is a certain bourgeois mentality about many of the women’s attempts at change: they often have resources that are beyond the ken of many ordinary people. But still, there is a certain element of excitement that lifts their stories: the women are trying something scary, something new, something heretofore untried. And they aren’t afraid to fail. That, essentially, is what makes risk so frightening and so rewarding: the possibility that it will not work out. But, again, there is always the possibility that it will.

I sit now, in a new place, in a new town, in an essentially new life, all because I was and will continue to be comfortable leaving my comfort zone. I know that my years overseas enriched both my life and my art and I count myself extremely fortunate to have been given that chance. But I also know that there are many risks I have been offered, and many I have taken, all because I can’t imagine playing it safe. I may not climb Everest, but I will not, as long as I am physically and mentally able, allow myself to get too comfortable.

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Alone, Again. Naturally.

Posted on October 4, 2011 by lisa

From my desk, as I sit writing this, I can see the water: the Bull River out beyond a large marsh, the look of which changes depending on the tides. Off to my left is a small marina with a tiny cluster of sailboats and power boats; farther to the left still is the bridge to Tybee Island, the tip of which I can view out beyond the river. The sound the cars make as they go over the bridge, a kind of gentle thump thump is as interesting and comforting to me as were the clack of high heels on the pavement outside the Paris apartment where I lived for two years earlier in this century.

I have long desired to live on the water, and to be able to see it as I work at my desk is a luxury that still causes me to breathe in deeply in awe and gratitude. I have been here just over two weeks, the condominium is shaping up and starting to look like it belongs to me and I have begun to hang art on the walls, although there is precious little wall space as the huge windows on two sides of the living room, while letting in light and air and warmth and view, leave only small areas to place paintings. It is a small price to pay for having finally landed in a place of my choosing.

I have met several people here already, at a volunteer organization I have been roped into serving by my active best friend, a native who returned to Savannah a few years ago after living around the world for two decades; at the stunning cathedral-esque synagogue where I worshipped with more Jews in one room than I have seen, perhaps, in my lifetime; at the home of one of the congregants who generously invited me to a post-service lunch. Without exception, all of those whom I have met have asked me: Did you move here alone?

It seems remarkable, in the sense of it being something to remark upon, my move here solo. Alone. Without partner or children.

Yes. The short answer is yes. I am alone.

Do I need to explain to every inquiry that I have a boyfriend still in Virginia? Or children in college who may well end up here at some point? Or that my best friend lives here so, in that, sense, I am not truly alone?

I think not. Because it doesn’t matter. The fact is that I have picked up and moved house, five hundred miles away from the two towns in which I spent the last 26 years of my life. By myself. The last time I lived fully alone was in 1985. The last time I moved hundreds of miles alone I was twenty three years old.

I called my mother the other day and told her that every time I look out at the water I think of her. For most of her own life she wanted nothing more than to live by the sea, but she put it off for reasons only she can fathom, and six years ago, when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the dream became moot. Now she lives in an assisted living complex with no water view, her tiny, lovely house on the East Side of Providence but a memory. She asks me every time I talk to her why I moved to Savannah, and each time I tell her it was just because I wanted to, that, like her, I had longed to live by the water and I had finally done something about it. She sighs, not with envy—her disease has softened her once brittle edges and made her gentle and loving—but with joy for me, with happiness. She can hear in my voice how it gladdens me to have achieved this dream.

So here I sit, well into middle age, re-inventing myself through a new space and a new view and a new way of living. I put my money where my dream was and I leapt. I will sit at my desk, writing as I have done for the past thirty five years, but here I will not mow the grass, or garden in my “spare” time. I will not shovel snow nor maneuver around ice. I will not bundle up for months. I will embrace the heat and the warmth and the slow pace of life in this the deep South. And as often as I can, I will walk on the beach and gaze out at the wide expanse of ocean that is now my neighborhood.

Here I will establish myself, alone

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Ships, Harbors, Journeys: Sending my daughter off to college

Posted on August 23, 2011 by lisa

My daughter came home recently and told me that she had found the tattoo she would get were she to get a tattoo. It was a quote that said “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not why ships are built.” When I looked it up, I saw that its attribution seems to be in some doubt. But its meaning is clear.

My daughter and I are both getting ready to set sail from our own safe harbors and although we know that that is for what we were built, the anxiety and fear slide easily in on top of the necessity and excitement. Each day for both of us, separately and together, is a bit of a roller coaster.

My daughter is headed to college in Boston, and I am moving from Virginia, a state in which I have lived for twenty-six years, to Savannah, Georgia.

The house is full of boxes, packed and partly packed, suitcases, and the detritus that comes with moving. It is unsettling. Unsettling and exhilarating. Terrible and wonderful.

My daughter is the last of my two children to leave the nest. The thought of walking by her empty bedroom is almost unbearable. But that is not why I am moving. I am fulfilling a dream to live by the water and now I shall be free to do it, knowing that in many small ways, I shall always be tethered to the places I have left.

When my son exited my house, the transition seemed somewhat easier. I still had my daughter to occupy my time and my energy. But I also had a huge and nearly empty house that had recently been the scene of a divorce from my children’s father. Two years later, with a new husband and my daughter in tow, I moved up the road from the town in which I had raised those children, to another Virginia town forty minutes away. Here my daughter and I spent four years, mostly alone together, when my second marriage failed. Here my daughter attended high school and grew up. Here I learned a new town, made new friends. But I knew, all the while, that when she left I would, too. This town, as lovely as it is, as wonderful as it has been to both of us, was just a holding pattern. When my daughter left for college I would, finally, make a home in a place I had chosen. By the water, with no old ghosts wandering it.

Yet this setting sail from our safe harbor is no easy task for either my daughter or me.

She is beginning a whole new life. As an eighteen year old adult she will have to learn to make her own decisions, she will have to learn that I am not right there to catch her when she falls. She will have to maneuver a city, a college, friends, and lovers. She will have to remember her own homework, find her own keys, tend to her own obligations. I will not be right outside her room to consult on which outfit she will wear.

This is, of course, a good thing. She is more than ready. And I raised her, as I did my son, to move away from me. To take what I had given both my children and use it as they navigate the new and stormy waters alone. My kids are good, solid, decent, smart, and clever. They are also loving and kind. My daughter will be fine, I tell myself. She will be fine, she tells herself. And yet the ache of longing for both of us makes us, if only for a moment, wish to stay put in our safe harbor. To stand fast in the life we have made, a life that is known, comfortable, and not very scary.

Yet the truth is that the world is a scary place, no matter where you dock. I was living in this house when I lost my father, when my sisters and I became estranged. I was in this house when my son lost his way. My daughter was in this house when her brother almost lost his balance completely, when a dear friend committed suicide, when other losses occurred. She was in this house when friends began to leave and go away to college, when friendships changed. She was in this house as she grew from a child into a woman. We both know that tragedy and triumph can find you wherever you sail, whatever harbor you find yourself in.
I will miss my synagogue, my dear friends, some astonishing acquaintances. I shall miss my regular weekly mah jongg game, the man at the coffee and tea kiosk who begins to make my order as soon as he sees my car, my pharmacist who steps up with my medicines without my even asking. I will miss walking the downtown and seeing familiar faces. I will miss knowing the territory. My daughter will miss all that, too. She will miss her long country drives, the mountains she adores, the friends who gather ‘round her. She will miss the intimate knowledge of the topography. She will miss her brother who is a half hour away and with whom a deep and intimate and wondrous relationship has been fashioned from the natural antagonism of siblings.

I recently had all my old VHS tapes digitized so that I could put them on DVD, save them from deterioration, view them more easily. So that they would take up less space. But in viewing them I see that the saving of space is an illusion, just as the safety of a harbor is. The memories that grab us and hold on tight are larger than any box we can find for them. The history that permeates each place we live catches us hard and fast; it wraps around us like a blanket, even as we drive down the road to a new place to land.

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