on lower case letters

bell hooks is the other writer, besides the obvious e e cummings, who caused me to write in humble but also glaringly narcissistic lower case letters from the teenage discovery of poetry and for the rest of my life. In 2001, my brilliant Brown summer love from 1997 asked me to have an environmental economics prof of mine send him a pdf library of tradeable emission permit literature. I carbon copied the old bf to the request, and Raj sent back a shocked retort: is this prof such a big deal you’ve started using capital letters?

In 2001 I also went to hear bell hooks speak, in a giant evangelical church dug much deeper into Oakland than my telegraph ave muscousy-peach stucco sublet. Snuggled into the pews between power buttocks and yards of extensions, my brilliant White summer love and I were sheepish, in the black sheep sense of the word as well as shy to the point of sweating. Bell hooks writes beautifully and honestly about love as action, I milked her words for a wedding reading last year to great appreciation. She is not all hugs and buttercups when it comes to loving thy systematically privileged historical enslaver, but I wasn’t really expecting it. I can handle that my Boer ancestors are an embarrassment, and I can own up to how that embarrassment has rendered me advantaged.

Her opening act was Rebecca Walker, famously half-black, half-white & half-Jewish and as categorically jeopardized as they come. Except of course she is gorgeous, always a plus when you are pushing buttons. Walker’s mother wrote The Colour Purple, which was so doused in incest and religious fanaticism and racist hatred that my own purple heart fell out onto the page, and I disturbingly demanded equally harrowing plot lines from literature ever since.

The Walker women are now feuding because Rebecca claims Alice denigrated motherhood in that quintessential second-wave way we WASPs summarize as Julianne Moore’s belted-waist & blossom skirt suicide in The Hours: it is horrible, you lose yourself, and then you die.

Hmm.

Rebecca’s newest book is called Baby Love. It’s about her choice to mother and how lovely it is, despite her adult suspicion of the act, and her mother’s persistent and politicized discouragement. To the point of disowning Rebecca. Holy jesus Alice, and I thought Celie’s story was brutal.

My mother disagrees with me when I am prematurely unequivocal. She encourages caution when I say things like Love Is Bullshit or Without Nationalized Daycare No one Should Procreate. But I can safely say from the way she coddles my poodle that she would unequivocally find my reproduction The Best Idea Ever. So although I wish Obtaining Grotesque Amounts of Higher Education ranked a little higher while my biological clock remains in its manufacturer’s packaging, I am grateful that Mom managed to pull me out of elementary school to attend feminist protest rallies and she still took pride in the undrugged birthing of three chubscicle babies. But her sacrifices were always apparent, and for the time being they really do not seem like sacrifices I’d be willing to make.

My impulse is to accuse Rebecca of being too harsh, regardless of the accusation that Alice cut her from her will and started the antagonistic fiasco from the start. Rebecca is being pouty. Poor little brilliant Rebecca who’s mom is an even more brilliant writer and thinker and fighter, who was (what with the time constraints and all), a less than coddling mama. Lucky Rebecca had her father’s other wife to look to for a model of stay-at-home mother-smother.

Not to turn this into a tirade about the impossibility of being the perfect power leader- cupcake baker chimera, I had to voice how irritated Rebecca has me. And yes, that’s well and good for me to say what with my mother having worked part-time while my nose ran and my bones grew. What is always left out of these mommy war gripings is the possibility of debating daddying for while. Come on Rebecca, do that for a minute. Without necessarily attaching photos of the Jolie-Pitt bonanza…let’s just take a wee break from judging our mothers and ourselves as (potential?) mothers.