Ann Althouse has a moving and personal post about December 9, 1980. There’s more there than meets the eye, for those of you who don’t particularly care about the anniversary of John Lennon’s murder, because it meant something very important to her. Looking back on it, it is a story of conformity and nonconformity, of insecurity, and something a little universal in modern womanhood:
On the day I heard that John had died, I was a law student at NYU. I remember dragging myself in to the law review office and expecting everyone there to be crying and talking about it, but no one was saying anything at all. I never felt so alienated from my fellow law students as I did on that day. I was insecure enough to feel that I was being childish to be so caught up in the story of the death of a celebrity long past his prime. I didn’t even take the train uptown to go stand in the crowd that I knew had gathered outside the Dakota. What did I do? I can’t remember. I probably buried myself in work on a law review article…
How I regret not going uptown to be among the people who openly mourned John Lennon! How foolish I was to think I was foolish to care and to put my effort into blending in with the law review editors who, I imagined, were behaving in a way I needed to learn!
I was especially sensitive about fitting in, because I was six months pregnant with my first child, and I worried that this experience was tearing me away from the career I had spent the last two and a half years studying to begin. I was 29 years old, older than most of the other law students. I doubted any of them had studied fine arts, my undergraduate major. With my age, my art school background, and my pregnancy, I was imposter, constantly threatened with exposure. I couldn’t walk out on these people and go be with the mourners. I only watched the mourners on television and felt doubly sad.
I can relate to the "imposter" feeling, "constantly threatened with exposure." And the almost embarrassing obviousness of a pregnancy in a place where pregnancies are not often seen. I was in an engineering program, not law school. I went a different way from Ann — my pregnancies and children did, eventually, tear me away from that career I’d sought — and I’m not sorry, for myself. But I do feel a certain warmth towards people like Ann, whose success hasn’t managed to tamp down their humanity.
You’d think I’d always be the cheerleader for ditch your career! stay home with your kids! I don’t know any details about any particular person’s decisions, how they affect her kids, etc. Anyone who asks me knows how much I worry about children who spend a lot of time in day care and other institutions. But I admit to a certain amount of pleased pride in a woman who (a) doesn’t let a desire/calling for a career prevent her from raising a family (b) braves that feeling of impostership, that fear of exposure, that Ann writes about, and manages to overcome it.
It’s not so much that I am pro-supermom or anything. That’s hard, and rarely worth it for long! It’s more that I am so pleased when those glassed-in, walled-in worlds that can pretend they are so remote from families, from love, from babies, from children — are forced to bend a little from the weightiness and import of families, love, babies, children, where the real work of humanity takes place.
That, and that I am one of those, or she is one of us. I went home, after a while. But oh, how I remember what it was like for those brief (or were they long?) years of living in two worlds, going to graduate school, coming home to my child, lugging the pregnant belly back and forth. Trying to figure out where my real home was, or whether I was some kind of dual citizen. In the end I chose for my children, but by that time the same choice was also for me. I finished my degree, and that was enough for me of a certain measure of success: that me, the imposter, and the pregnant belly that gave me away, had come up against the university and won.
bearing blog 