When Do You Leave?

 

The events in the book in the middle happened 80 years ago this year. The Chalet School In Exile is one of the most extraordinary children’s books I’ve ever read and I still get more and more from it during every reread. It’s written contemporaneously, which gives it a unique perspective, and from the point of view of being generously sympathetic to the German population. I’ve often had the thought “When would I leave” on reading it.

Do you leave when you’re getting uncomfortable with the political unrest alluded to in an earlier book in the series? What about when you see the Nazi party consolidating power? Do you start thinking about packing up your life when you see the local young fellas with nothing better to do chasing the Jewish goldsmith through the village? There’s no spoiler alert required; the school quite clearly does leave and goes into exile (spoiler alert: the initial exile is short lived) and lives are upended by doing so. The school’s history is forever altered, given that the author felt she couldn’t move the school back again once peace was restored to Europe.

I haven’t read the other two books as much as Exile, as its popularly known in the Facebook group where these books have gained a new lease of life, but they have sparked similar musings. When should Offred (TV or book Offred) have left? When the creeping march of control over her reproductive rights meant her husband had to sign the form to get the pill? When she was fired from work under the watchful gaze of “some other” army? What about when the initial terrorist attack took place? Packing up your life is a hard thing to do, when you don’t know what’s going to happen. Is it going to get worse? Is this temporary? What do you leave behind? These aren’t rational decisions, no matter how they might appear with the benefit of hindsight.

When Ireland gained independence women lost a lot. Things changed, such as the introduction of the marriage bar for women working in the civil service. Once you got married, you had to leave. This rule wended its way into other parts of the workforce over time. We had never been great at looking after women and children, but the new state didn’t think to address this. Instead, decisions were made to pay religious orders to provide “care” for women, including those who weren’t married but were pregnant. We know how this ended and we have never properly dealt with this legacy. Women were constitutionally categorised as belonging in the home, something which needs to go but is usually dismissed as an anachronism with no real meaning. I don’t agree; it is a horrible thing to read about yourself in your country’s constitution.

Would you leave, knowing the kind of things your new country is doing and saying about women? Would you stay, hoping that the birth of a nation meant some unpleasantness but an eventual working out of the things that a republic is supposed to be? We’ve long had a history of emigration, so packing up and leaving is part of almost every family’s story, mine included. People left, and returned, and made things better. We can change our constitution, and we do, frequently. We have moved forward since independence and this 1937 document. The one pictured above is one of several little blue books I own; this one is from 2018. Before we repealed the eighth. I’m keeping it, because I know how things can change and sometimes its good to have a reminder of what can happen and how it can happen and how hard you have to work to correct the trajectory of a nation.

Monica, and being 22.

I remember the Monica Lewinsky “scandal” very well. I say “scandal” because with 20 years in between then and now I’ve revised a lot of my thoughts about her, and Bill Clinton, and that time, and how I feel about it all. I was about 14 when it all kicked off and Monica seemed like a glamorous, go-getting woman in her 20s to me, someone who had her life together and was going places and knew what she wanted and how to get it.

Obviously the age gap hasn’t changed but now I feel much closer in age to her, which is the usual feeling you get as you grow older. I’ve been the new college graduate, unsure of myself and trying to figure out the working world and my place in it after the security of years spent in full-time education. I’ve navigated the world of older men in my workplace, and walked the tightrope of years spent being polite and never quite being sure if something is what you think it is or if its something you probably shouldn’t have to put up with.

I’ve been thinking about being 22 and being around people in power, and being around one of the most powerful people in the world. I’ve been thinking about sex, and what I regarded as sex, and what other people, mostly men at least twice my age, think about sex and consent and right and wrong. It’s uncomfortable to look back at 22 year old me, and think about 22 year old Monica, and the choices we made and the things which happened which weren’t really choices at all.

I’ve listened to  season 2 of Slow Burn and what other people said about Monica and how she navigated all that pressure and how, shamefully, she became the punchline of so many jokes about sex and power and men and what they do and who they do it to. I thought about my clothes when I was 22, and how I probably would have considered a navy dress from Gap as the ideal choice for working in an office.

I think about the working world now and my place in it and if things have changed and if a 22 year old in my workplace would be treated like Monica, regardless of how many people proclaim #metoo and talk about consent and condemn the actions of men in power who take what they want. I think about the current man in the White House, and the 22 year olds who work in that building, wearing the Gap dresses and figuring out their place in the world and I hope their world is better than mine was when I was 22 and when Monica was 22.

But I don’t know if it is, or if it can be, knowing what we know about everything that’s happened since Monica was 22.

Tiny Sparks of Joy

Discovering the Mueller She Wrote podcast and having an equally obsessed friend to pass the good news on to.

Throwing some money at something and it being worth every penny. At nine months pregnant I will pay for some of my problems to go away.

Small bursts of energy in between much longer periods of achy exhaustion.

Friends having good news after a very long time.

A mainly decluttered home which means order can be restored to the whole house in less than an hour after a busy Saturday.

Fire and Fury

Things I miss about 2015:

• Going days without knowing what the President of the United States was doing or saying.
• Long news cycles.
• The term ‘shithole’ not appearing in any reasonable news report.

2018 is proving to be a bumpy ride.

Janet Collins

In an effort to follow Marjorie’s sage advice that everyone should know a little bit about many things, I’ve been expanding my horizons a little and today watched a short children’s film about Janet Collins, who, to my shame, I had never heard of before now. I adored ballet as a child and started lessons late – if you want to be a ballerina, that is – at 13 years of age. I wasn’t particularly good but I loved every minute of it and even now I try a few steps when the mood takes me.

I feel utterly humbled when I feel disgruntled about my working life when I read stories like her. I have face little real adversity and I have felt hard done by when I really shouldn’t have because my barriers to entry for every job I’ve held have been relatively low for me. I’ve never been asked to paint my face, nor have I faced systematic racial discrimination.

I’ve had a long week in work and I’m running off not a lot of sleep, but reading about inspiring people like her makes me give myself a stern talking to and get on in the world without complaining, but with an attitude that challenging the system is always a good thing.

In And Out

I cringed upon seeing a tweet from a regular contributor to national newspapers referring to the problems for a country when ‘incomers’ bring up the birth rate.

I am married to an ‘incomer’ – but I suppose this isn’t a problem because he’s also technically ‘one of us’ due to a sheer accident of parentage.

I often feel I’m on the outside in Ireland when it comes to social issues. I have to explain why I won’t support religious charities and why, as a couple, we’ve made certain decisions.

I am an insider because I’ve been raised here by parents who were also raised here by parents who were raised here. Some of my ancestors must have been ‘incomers’ at some point, if the story told by the origins of various surnames scattered throughout my family history is true.

I feel like an outsider when I’m told in an authoritative tone that the contribution of ‘incomers’ to a birth rate means problems do arise.

At least we’re in enough that the whims of a capricious president doesn’t put our legal status in jeopardy. But we’re just out enough that it feels some people think we’re a problem because of the choices we’ve made.

 

The Dreamers

The first time I went to New York was on a family trip when I was 21 years old and the city was still digging through the remains of the World Trade Center. On a sunny, freezing cold day we got a ferry to Ellis Island and did a tour. The five of us had a chance to crowd around a computer and search the database. Both my parents knew many young people from their respective home towns had likely passed through immigration in the building we sat in, and sure enough just searching through lists using a couple of search terms threw up familiar names, sometimes a little misspelled (probably due to accents and things getting lost in translation during what must have been a fairly noisy, busy process), and always young. They were 16, 17, 18 or 19 years of age, setting off I suppose with dreams and hopes of their own. They can’t have been that different to my and my siblings who were of similar ages and had and still have dreams of our own.

In 2011, we went to America on honeymoon and spent the last few days in New York. I felt a real urge to visit Ellis Island again so on a sunny, warm day we got a ferry there and did another tour. This time, it was me and my brand new husband sharing a computer and we did similar searches and once again I was wondering why I was so moved by simple lists of names, ages and places of birth and why I would feel a connection to those people and hoped life had turned out ok for them.

My husband is an immigrant. He wasn’t born in Ireland, but he grew up here. Thanks to a strange twist of fate his parents came back here and so he has dual citizenship and, thanks to various legal immigration and citizenship arrangements so do I. We’re white, we’ve both got transferrable skills and we’d both qualify under the proposed new immigration rating system to go back to New York once more and work there. We’re not really dreaming about that right now, for many reasons. Your dreams change over time – be they the dreams of a 17 year old boy still queasy from weeks spent on a rocky ship seeing a city for the first time or a couple who aren’t worried about impressing immigration officials standing in a huge hall.

I don’t know how my husband or I would cope if he was sent ‘back’ to his country of birth. His parents did everything above board, but that’s just the luck of the draw. They had dreams when they left to make a life somewhere else and have children and work and build something new. My husband shouldn’t have to live with an immigration based sword of Damocles hanging over him and, thankfully, he doesn’t and nor do I. But when I organised our files yesterday and sorted through paperwork from different countries letting us know who we are and what we can do and, in essence, what a country thinks of us, I began to think about the Dreamers in New York, and everywhere else in America.

I think about them, and the lists of those young people we saw on a computer screen in Ellis Island, and the hopes and dreams they have and had. And I think of the poem every Irish school kid has to analyse for exams rendering it devoid of meaning until you can read it for its own sake, WB Yeats’ The Cloths of Heaven. And I hope that those in the US who can do something about the Dreamers remember to tread softly, because they are treading on people’s dreams.

I Started Doing More Housework, More Baking

Thankfully, unlike Offred I haven’t been let go from my job, even though that used to be something that really happened to women like me when they got married. I do, however, have more time in the evenings thanks to a nice summer schedule.

I’m not living under the same level of oppression and control as Offred, but I am living under the mild to moderate to severe level of terror I’ve felt since last November which must feel a little similar, maybe? I’m not a state asset for breeding (well, the eighth amendment can make you wonder a bit) nor I am separated from my husband and forced into sex with a stranger.

But I have started doing more housework, more baking. I’ve retreated home more and I think I’m trying to shield myself from the world more because it is very difficult to escape from the 24 hour news cycle I seem to have become enveloped by for over a year now.

I really hope this is all I have in common with Offred. I can live with more housework and baking, and the hope that some people will finally do the right thing.

Every Action Has an Equal and Opposite Reaction.

I was going to write a happy positive post about how great my weekend was. And then yesterday changed all that. I grew up with terrorism, I grew up knowing vaguely that a number of groups of people living on the same island as me were happy to kill people to achieve their aims.

I think this sums up a lot of what I’m feeling today, this line in particular:

We cannot pretend that the ugly bigotry unleashed in the streets of Charlottesville, Va., this weekend has nothing to do with the election of Donald Trump.

Threads, Or How I Learned to Start Worrying and Fear the Bomb.

This week, I’ve been thinking about Threads a lot. It’s a film that I watched on YouTube, having seen some clips of it on a BBC documentary. I’m pretty easily scared, and this is the scariest film I’ve ever seen. It shows you, in slow and excruciating detail, just how scary real life can and will get in the aftermath of a thermonuclear conflict. There will be no rescuers saving the day. There will be no winner. There will be no afterwards.

I have no idea if the story about Ronald Reagan is true, namely that having seen Threads he reassessed nuclear policy. What’s really scary right now is knowing that the current president probably wouldn’t be swayed at all by watching it. We know he’s incurious and has shown no greater inclination towards curiosity, so I’m probably correct in my thinking that watching Threads won’t counteract his fire and fury approach to nuclear policy.

Threads is scary because it presents nuclear war as people will experience it. There is nothing scarier than knowing what you’re watching could be real. The people who suffer in Threads are mothers, fathers, children, delivery people, civil servants – all ‘normal’ people, doing ‘normal’ things. They are us. They are the North Koreans.