Susan Miller: Conversations with My Son
This has been on my mind today, so I wanted to put it somewhere I could look at it.
from A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and a Prayer, edited by Eve Ensler and Mollie Doyle
On the same day, in the same newspaper, this is what I read: “In
war-torn Africa, young girls are very very old.” Three pages
later: “A village grows rich off its main export: its daughters.” I
rip out the articles to put in a folder thick with these clippings. A
woman in India goes to the police to report a gang rape, and she
is raped by the police. A Pakistani woman is punished for crimes
her brother committed. UN peacekeepers in the Congo lure
twelve-year-old girls with cookies and do to them what is always
done to them.
I call my son. “What does this mean? You’re a man. Is this
something you understand?”
“Mom-”
There’s a certain way he says “Mom” that means whatever I
want to talk about, he doesn’t.
“Chill. Not now, okay? I’m going into a meeting. I’m pulling
onto the Disney lot as we speak. Wait, I’ll ask the guard at the
gate what he thinks. Yeah. He says he’s not getting into it with
me again.”
“Fine.”
My son has been part of this sorrowful, tortured inquiry into
the nature of humanity since he was old enough to ask why it
was always the women who had to take their clothes off in
movies.
“Look, I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry this is in the world.”
“Call me after the pitch. What’s it about?”
“A mother and son’s tortured inquiry into the sorry nature of
humanity. Which I’m hoping Disney thinks is about a girl who
turns into a skyscraper.”
“Well, if anyone can do it-”
“Remember the mantra, Mom.” He names women who have
changed history. He rattles off female heads of state. And I shoot
back with baseball players and their stats.
“They’ll probably make me turn the girl into a boy.”
“Don’t let them.”
I wish him luck and go on with my day. So many people seeking
asylum, while I seek penance for my privilege. In the house
where I grew up there was a light at the end of the hall-secure
passage. I thought this was everywhere. I believed this to be like
everyone’s house. And so I install a light at the end of the hall
where I live with my growing son.
He’s seventeen. He’s just gotten off the phone with a girl.
“Abby’s going out with a jerk.”
“A jerk in what way?”
“A jerk in the way he treats her.”
“She shouldn’t stay with him, then.”
“That’s what I told her.”
“Is he hurting her?”
“Not physically. But a man acting rotten-that’s not being a
man.”
Emily, Alison, Shoshana-these are not names in my son’s little
black book. These are the young women who call him, who he
meets for coffee, who come to our house for Scrabble, who seek
his counsel, who counsel him. These are his friends. In their
company he becomes a man and what a man should be.
But there was a period of time when he did not want to look
at girls or women in the context of their historical plight. He
didn’t care to hear my opinions on the subject, either. So I mostly
kept quiet when he and his friends ogled the opposite sex, which
had really become for them, suddenly, a sex so opposite their
own that they had no choice but to study and learn it, to fall
under its sway, to map it. This was, after all, a rite of passage.
And I didn’t want to deprive him of it. All I could do was hope
he’d emerge someday from this hormonal stupor and once again
recognize the opposite sex as human people from planet Earth.
He’s thirty. I call him out of a deep sleep. “What is this date-rape
drug? Why would a human do this to another human?”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
“What if you have a daughter someday?”
“Please. Why do you do this to me? I’m going back to sleep.”
We hang up. He calls me back.
“I’d have her followed. I’d have her phone tapped. I’d hire
someone to watch over her.”
Our conversation spills over to the next day.
“Just-crimes against women are different,” he says. “I mean,
you don’t worry about your son getting date-raped. Maybe you
worry about your son raping his date. Jesus. Has the world eaten
up and sucked the soul out of more people, or do I just know
more about it? I think men feel inferior in a lot of ways to do
these things. And women pay the price. It goes way back. You
know you can physically dominate, but there’s an unwritten law
that a man should never put his hands on a woman or child.
‘Women and children first’ is there for a reason. They’re more
important.”
I’m walking. I’m walking to figure out what I’m thinking. My
cell rings. “What’s up with this American servicewoman putting
an Iraqi prisoner on a leash?”
“But who do you think gave the orders? Who put us there in
the first place?”
“Still. Mom. Still.”
I miss him. I miss his face. So I fly out to visit him in L.A. We’re
sitting with our coffee in the morning sun, watching people buy
fruit and flowers at the farmers’ market. While, somewhere else,
it’s been another day of violence.
“How’s the thing going with Disney?”
“You know, they have all these concrete barriers up around
the studio? Like outside there’s this acknowledgment that we’re
all in serious trouble. Then you go inside, and you’re sitting in
some executive’s office trying to sell an idea, and they tell you
they’re only buying things that meet their mandate, which you
know and they know will be completely different next week.
And, anyhow, whatever it is, it’s not about anything that counts.
It’s not about those concrete barriers and what they mean. It’s
like they have no concept of the actual world in there.”
“But you sold it. You got the deal.”
“But I’m not so happy about it.”
I know what he means. I’ve been in those rooms, my purse
bulging with small bottles of water offered to make it seem as if
attention is being paid, and guest passes that allow you through
the studio gates but not into a place you recognize as having any
connection to the place you’re from. And my son is following the
same thorny path. He’s a writer. He’s a writer, like his mother.
And although I worry about how he’ll deal with rejection and
compromise and even success, I can’t help feeling glad he’s a
writer. Glad and hopeful.
The market is in full swing now. And the breeze from the
ocean brings such relief, it’s enough to make you feel, for a moment,
that everything is fine. I can tell my son feels this, too. But
he breaks the reverie. Someone had to.
“All those articles you send me that I wish you would stop
sending me, well, I actually started reading them,” he says. “I
mean, why isn’t the world in an uproar? Why are we worried
about bird flu when women are being mutilated and raped? Why
aren’t we marching on Congress for that? And nobody has a clue
why we’re in Iraq, but we would know why we were in Darfur.
And maybe the privileged white kids who’d go to Canada to
avoid a war they don’t understand might actually go to war to
stop men from killing women. I’d have no problem. Well, except
for food and bathrooms.”
I laugh. And then I ask him how living with me, and not living
with both his parents, affected his feelings about women.
“Is this a trick question?”
“Seriously.”
“If you’re raised by a single mother, then you know a woman
is as strong as a man-stronger. I’ve seen mothers save their kids’
lives. I think boys brought up by their mothers are closer to
them. It gives you more respect for the opposite sex. And I feel
an obligation to write women stronger.”
I am proud of him always, but at this moment I am also sure
of him.
Back in New York, the phone rings. “So, what are their names,
Mom? The women in India and Darfur and Pakistan and China
and here, in this country. What are their names?”
I read from my clippings. “Usha, Ye Xiang, Solange, Mukhtar.”
“That’s your new mantra.”
As a little boy, my son imagined saving children and animals.
Maybe just his imagining protected them. As a man, my son
loves women for their bodies, their difference, their strength.
Maybe one man’s love can be an example to other men. As a
writer, my son portrays women the way he sees them. Maybe
what he writes will one day let them be seen.
from A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and a Prayer, edited by Eve Ensler and Mollie Doyle
On the same day, in the same newspaper, this is what I read: “In
war-torn Africa, young girls are very very old.” Three pages
later: “A village grows rich off its main export: its daughters.” I
rip out the articles to put in a folder thick with these clippings. A
woman in India goes to the police to report a gang rape, and she
is raped by the police. A Pakistani woman is punished for crimes
her brother committed. UN peacekeepers in the Congo lure
twelve-year-old girls with cookies and do to them what is always
done to them.
I call my son. “What does this mean? You’re a man. Is this
something you understand?”
“Mom-”
There’s a certain way he says “Mom” that means whatever I
want to talk about, he doesn’t.
“Chill. Not now, okay? I’m going into a meeting. I’m pulling
onto the Disney lot as we speak. Wait, I’ll ask the guard at the
gate what he thinks. Yeah. He says he’s not getting into it with
me again.”
“Fine.”
My son has been part of this sorrowful, tortured inquiry into
the nature of humanity since he was old enough to ask why it
was always the women who had to take their clothes off in
movies.
“Look, I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry this is in the world.”
“Call me after the pitch. What’s it about?”
“A mother and son’s tortured inquiry into the sorry nature of
humanity. Which I’m hoping Disney thinks is about a girl who
turns into a skyscraper.”
“Well, if anyone can do it-”
“Remember the mantra, Mom.” He names women who have
changed history. He rattles off female heads of state. And I shoot
back with baseball players and their stats.
“They’ll probably make me turn the girl into a boy.”
“Don’t let them.”
I wish him luck and go on with my day. So many people seeking
asylum, while I seek penance for my privilege. In the house
where I grew up there was a light at the end of the hall-secure
passage. I thought this was everywhere. I believed this to be like
everyone’s house. And so I install a light at the end of the hall
where I live with my growing son.
He’s seventeen. He’s just gotten off the phone with a girl.
“Abby’s going out with a jerk.”
“A jerk in what way?”
“A jerk in the way he treats her.”
“She shouldn’t stay with him, then.”
“That’s what I told her.”
“Is he hurting her?”
“Not physically. But a man acting rotten-that’s not being a
man.”
Emily, Alison, Shoshana-these are not names in my son’s little
black book. These are the young women who call him, who he
meets for coffee, who come to our house for Scrabble, who seek
his counsel, who counsel him. These are his friends. In their
company he becomes a man and what a man should be.
But there was a period of time when he did not want to look
at girls or women in the context of their historical plight. He
didn’t care to hear my opinions on the subject, either. So I mostly
kept quiet when he and his friends ogled the opposite sex, which
had really become for them, suddenly, a sex so opposite their
own that they had no choice but to study and learn it, to fall
under its sway, to map it. This was, after all, a rite of passage.
And I didn’t want to deprive him of it. All I could do was hope
he’d emerge someday from this hormonal stupor and once again
recognize the opposite sex as human people from planet Earth.
He’s thirty. I call him out of a deep sleep. “What is this date-rape
drug? Why would a human do this to another human?”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
“What if you have a daughter someday?”
“Please. Why do you do this to me? I’m going back to sleep.”
We hang up. He calls me back.
“I’d have her followed. I’d have her phone tapped. I’d hire
someone to watch over her.”
Our conversation spills over to the next day.
“Just-crimes against women are different,” he says. “I mean,
you don’t worry about your son getting date-raped. Maybe you
worry about your son raping his date. Jesus. Has the world eaten
up and sucked the soul out of more people, or do I just know
more about it? I think men feel inferior in a lot of ways to do
these things. And women pay the price. It goes way back. You
know you can physically dominate, but there’s an unwritten law
that a man should never put his hands on a woman or child.
‘Women and children first’ is there for a reason. They’re more
important.”
I’m walking. I’m walking to figure out what I’m thinking. My
cell rings. “What’s up with this American servicewoman putting
an Iraqi prisoner on a leash?”
“But who do you think gave the orders? Who put us there in
the first place?”
“Still. Mom. Still.”
I miss him. I miss his face. So I fly out to visit him in L.A. We’re
sitting with our coffee in the morning sun, watching people buy
fruit and flowers at the farmers’ market. While, somewhere else,
it’s been another day of violence.
“How’s the thing going with Disney?”
“You know, they have all these concrete barriers up around
the studio? Like outside there’s this acknowledgment that we’re
all in serious trouble. Then you go inside, and you’re sitting in
some executive’s office trying to sell an idea, and they tell you
they’re only buying things that meet their mandate, which you
know and they know will be completely different next week.
And, anyhow, whatever it is, it’s not about anything that counts.
It’s not about those concrete barriers and what they mean. It’s
like they have no concept of the actual world in there.”
“But you sold it. You got the deal.”
“But I’m not so happy about it.”
I know what he means. I’ve been in those rooms, my purse
bulging with small bottles of water offered to make it seem as if
attention is being paid, and guest passes that allow you through
the studio gates but not into a place you recognize as having any
connection to the place you’re from. And my son is following the
same thorny path. He’s a writer. He’s a writer, like his mother.
And although I worry about how he’ll deal with rejection and
compromise and even success, I can’t help feeling glad he’s a
writer. Glad and hopeful.
The market is in full swing now. And the breeze from the
ocean brings such relief, it’s enough to make you feel, for a moment,
that everything is fine. I can tell my son feels this, too. But
he breaks the reverie. Someone had to.
“All those articles you send me that I wish you would stop
sending me, well, I actually started reading them,” he says. “I
mean, why isn’t the world in an uproar? Why are we worried
about bird flu when women are being mutilated and raped? Why
aren’t we marching on Congress for that? And nobody has a clue
why we’re in Iraq, but we would know why we were in Darfur.
And maybe the privileged white kids who’d go to Canada to
avoid a war they don’t understand might actually go to war to
stop men from killing women. I’d have no problem. Well, except
for food and bathrooms.”
I laugh. And then I ask him how living with me, and not living
with both his parents, affected his feelings about women.
“Is this a trick question?”
“Seriously.”
“If you’re raised by a single mother, then you know a woman
is as strong as a man-stronger. I’ve seen mothers save their kids’
lives. I think boys brought up by their mothers are closer to
them. It gives you more respect for the opposite sex. And I feel
an obligation to write women stronger.”
I am proud of him always, but at this moment I am also sure
of him.
Back in New York, the phone rings. “So, what are their names,
Mom? The women in India and Darfur and Pakistan and China
and here, in this country. What are their names?”
I read from my clippings. “Usha, Ye Xiang, Solange, Mukhtar.”
“That’s your new mantra.”
As a little boy, my son imagined saving children and animals.
Maybe just his imagining protected them. As a man, my son
loves women for their bodies, their difference, their strength.
Maybe one man’s love can be an example to other men. As a
writer, my son portrays women the way he sees them. Maybe
what he writes will one day let them be seen.