How I Finally Said No to Being a Fuckable Yes
As I sat in an AA meeting the other night, I saw someone else who acted like me eight years ago. There I was, just in another woman’s body, talking about the guilt she felt as a working mom. As most moms will tell you, children are wonderful—magical really but at times overwhelming, like you cant come up for air. It’s like you’re drowning in flowers: beautiful, but you’re still going down.
Eight years ago, every night after grabbing my two kids from school, I sat for an hour in rush hour traffic back from my beige office building that looked like it belonged in a strip mall. I would ask my kids how their day was while I sat there seething that we weren’t home yet, and that the only time I could have these conversations with my kids was as I glanced at them in the rear-view mirror. Nodding my head to their responses, catching their eye for a moment, only to look back at the road raged chaos of I-95 was how I lived two precious hours of every day with them. When we finally arrived home, I had no more energy left and so to get some, I started taking more pills—they made me into a very numb energizer bunny.
I was a strong woman. I was loud. I was VP at my company. I wore five-inch stiletto heels that sounded like firecrackers when I walked and I magically believed that the amount of clicks I made equated to something, but I could never really place my fingers on what that was.
When I had to travel for business, I rolled out a map of India to show Eliza, just nine months old, where I was planning to go, she waddled over in her diaper and sat on Mumbai, the very place I was headed. I was showing my baby girl what it was to be a feminist. I was proud, or so I thought. `
But I wasn’t proud. I was simply striving to be the forever Fuckable YES. The YES wife, the YES employee, the YES friend, the YES mother, the YES in bed. I wasn’t proud at all. If I was being honest with myself, I would have told my baby, “I’m sad. I don’t want to leave you. You’re only nine months old and I have to leave you for a week. Again.” And I would have looked at my husband and said “I’m not going to India. I quit.”
But none of that happened. Instead, I kept taking more pills, becoming thinner and sexier. Traveling more, doing more. Even while working endless hours at work and traveling, I somehow managed to train for the Miami Half Marathon—I wanted to prove that I could run 13.1 miles just seven months after having Cullen. I ran the half-marathon. But took a Percocet at mile ten to keep going. I made Fuckable YES a verb and I was exhausted.
And to be clear, even for women who don’t work outside of the home, there seems to be endless soccer games in East-bum-fuck and PTA driven events that rival the Kardashians’ Christmas party. The year before I left for The Refuge, my friend Erica threw her son a construction themed party, complete with a pile of sand that her husband brought in via a pickup truck from some far-off land where they sell dirt. The towering 5-foot mound allowed the kids to play like they were in a working construction zone with their Tonka trunks and bulldozers. As I watched in awe, my brain couldn’t stop the reel of Why the fuck couldn’t I come up with something like that? Erica even saw them off with goodies bags of bulldozer stickers.
Only speaking for myself here, but Feminism Fucked Me, and while it was consensual, there is a large part of me that feels like feminism was a hot investment banker named Chad that I happened to have a yearlong affair with, because everyone thinks very highly of investment bankers when you’re young. But the reality never matches the fantasy. In the end, trying to a full-time girlboss/mom/hot wife/feminist felt more like a Ponzi scheme that rivaled Madoff’s. Fucked by way of Feminism.
But once I went to rehab I realized, even though it was consensual, and I had agreed to the marriage of feminism—I could back out. I could renegotiate and instead, make boundaries, and be so bold to say that I while yes, I advocated for women’s reproductive rights, the right for a woman to be CEO, and the right to marry whoever you wanted, I could also say it’s okay to stay home.
Making fresh eggs from your backyard chickens doesn’t make you weak. I went back to work three years after rehab, and there are many nights where I wish my husband would tell me to wash the dishes. There are many nights I want to meet him at the door in an apron with a whisky sour, but it almost seems taboo to say so—like somehow I’m cheating on my comrades and Gloria Steinem will unfollow me on Instagram.
I’m not a Fuckable Yes anymore and while deep down inside I wish I still was, I have found some sort of peace in that: I can choose an imperfect imperfection, or I can choose honesty. Honesty is a push pull, a reality vs. delusion kind of life. But as Billy Began reminded me at The Refuge: Be Honest or Don’t Knock.
Coming Soon
This is a longtime dream in the making. I’m recording a podcast! The first episode will be out very soon and you’ll be the first to hear it.
Is it feminism or America’s particular brand of feminism (attached to capitalism and consumerism)? I ask because I see other countries in the world where women are able to take a considerable time off from work to have their kids, where they then come back to work part time to account for them having kids, or not at all and society supports them, etc, but these places also have a strong social safety net where the well-being of everyone is paramount. Woman are able to have the life they want, as mothers or career women, supported by the larger society, as with men, and in full ownership of their rights as human beings.
For me, where we got f***ed is American capitalism and consumerism. Once companies figured out that they now have double the income in households to extrapolate money from, they started selling us lies. The lie that we could have it all because they’ll sell us crap we don’t need to convince us that it will make our lives easier to “have it all.” That’s the paradigm to opt out of, the consumerism of it all.
Feminism has always been for me the right to make my own choices and for everyone to have that right. The idea of “having it all”, that was planted by women’s magazine publishers trying to sell you crap, and we all fell for it because it looked so good.
Love the honesty here my friend. I have been telling young women lately that, if you want it, you can have it all. But you absolutely CANNOT have it at the same time (like we were raised to believe). It took me several miserable years to realize that, and to realize that I had to give up some things to get others that were more important - like time to raise my specific kids, not some magically easy kids that we naively thought we'd have. So many days I wish life was easier like I imagine my SAHM friends have it, then I feel guilty for even for a moment wanting to give up this great job I pursued my whole life. Feminism is great, but it can also fuck us up along the way if we aren't careful. Love you!