“The Kids Are All Right” (photo credit: focus/everett/rex features)

Five or six years ago, towards the end of a summer graduate course that I was teaching, a student in the class came to my office.  She said she was going through a very painful breakup and as a result, she wondered if she could have a few extra days to complete her final project–she was moving out, which meant driving back and forth to the house they were selling, several hours outside the city.

Okay, usually I’m a suspicious bitch of a teacher and my standard response is “uh, no,” but it was summer and the student was easily the best in the class, so I said “sure,” and we talked a bit about how hard it was to end a relationship. In the course of our conversation I said, “what does he do,” meaning the other party in the breakup.

There was a pause, the woman looked at me, smiled, and said, “well, I’m gay, so it’s a she, actually, and she’s a lawyer.”

Now, I spend a lot of time in class talking about the need for students to examine the assumptions that they bring to reading and interpretation–I sometimes tell them it’s the “baggage theory” of reading, as in, whatever your own baggage is, it will provide the basis for your interpretations, so you’d better figure out the nature of those spoken and unspoken assumptions.

So right there, in my office, there I was: BAM! Smacked in the face with my own assumptions about heterosexuality–a sort of straight suitcase of assumption, as it were.

I was mortified, apologized profusely, made a (lame) joke about heteronormativity, and that was that.  I doubt the woman has given it a second thought.

Earlier this week, I played hooky from my desk (I think the desk understood) and went to the movies with a friend, who showed up wearing the same shorts I was wearing, so that was also mortifying, but in a slightly different contexts. Sartorially twinned, we hiked to the top floor of the theater to watch “The Kids Are All Right,” the new movie by Lisa Cholodenko about two kids and their lesbian moms, and what happens to the family as a result of the kids finding their sperm donor dad.

I thought the movie was great. Loved the image of an upper-middle-class marriage, those years way after “happily ever after,” when staying married has more to do with an act of will (and inertia?) than all the hot sex and romance of the early years; loved the way in which the kids love their “moms”  and are driven crazy by them on an almost daily basis.  (And okay, yes, the whole Mark Ruffalo with his shirt off thing made me pretty happy too.)

The movie sort of renders moot the whole idea of “gay marriage” by showing that gay marriage exists and is, more or less, a lot like straight marriage, particularly those marriages with kids (who according to New York Magazine,  make us all miserable).  There is a lot of unflashy and unromantic love in this movie; the kind of love that, as Julianne Moore says near the movie’s end, “endures” through the rough patches, even when things look hopeless.  It seemed to me a sometimes funny, sometimes heart-tugging examination of women in mid-life, in mid-marriage, and of the ways that kids do (and do not) understand that their parents are, you know, human.  You could say it’s the cinematic version of that Talking Heads song we all find ourselves humming from time to time: “this is not my beautiful life…how did I get here, anyway?”

I got home and started chatting about this remarkable thing called a “grown-up movie” in an actual movie theater! In July!  A movie where nothing blows up but Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore get nekkid.

Then I started reading around the internet. Never do that, if you want to preserve your own opinion. 

And BAM! It happened again: the hetero baggage whapping me in the face.  Why, as Roxie’s World asks, should a lesbian marriage be “just like” a straight marriage? Why, as Dan Savage asks, shouldn’t a sperm donor (or surrogate mother, in the opposite context) become a part of the family? Why would a lesbian film-maker rely on the age-old plot device of a vaguely dissatisfied lesbian falling into the arms of a man?

Why hadn’t any of those questions occurred to me? I mean, among all my various relatives, you can find just about every permutation of “family” you can imagine, so why wouldn’t it occur to me that there might have been other possiblities available to Cholodenko in creating her story?  Is it because my own marriage is a pretty straight-forward (oh yeah, totally intentional pun) hetero dyad?

Some of the negative commentary about the movie does seem, as Dan Savage points out, along the lines of “gosh why didn’t she make a different movie,” and there have been some vague implications that maybe Cholodenko was doing what she had to do to get the movie financed (greenlight a perfect lesbian family in which there are only happy kids and hot sex? never gonna happen).  I don’t know what the financing politics were–nothing in Hollywood seems to make much sense to me (”Grownups,” “The Expendables,” or  ”Kitty Galore,” anyone?)

But after all was said and done, I remain convinced that it’s a really good movie, even if it’s not perfect. And one of the reasons it’s good, I think, is that it made me  re-realize how easy it is to stay stuck in the ruts of my own assumptions about the world–and thus miss the oppportunity to see the world through the eyes of others.  Would it be nice if the movie re-imagined family in a more capacious, less conservative way? Sure. But that’s not the movie that got written–and I think that, ironically, there may even be something positive about the fact that we live in a moment when we can say that a Hollywood representation of a lesbian marriage is “too conservative.”

Cuz you know, nothing says “I love you” like a face full of cheap cigarillo smoke.

You look at this ad, shake your head, chuckle, and say “god can you believe that?”

Yesterday, walking on 23rd street, I saw an ad on the side of a bus stop:

We’ve come a long way baby, haven’t we?  You’ll want to pay special attention to the little white box in the lower left corner, which tells you how to download the app:

I’m not sure what the app is for: is it for the gambling game? for the hotel? or for a woman with the body of an adolescent boy and the boobs of a nursing mother to sprawl belly-up on the screen of your phone?

Of particular notice here is that the woman is so artfully arranged: is that the ankle strap of her shoe, or strap holding her down? After all, we can’t see her other leg or either wrist. She’s just…sprawled there. Are we (and I think the “we” here is the we of the male persuasion, don’t you?) supposed to be throwing dice on her tummy?

Even if I hadn’t just watched a preview from Jean Kilbourne’s latest documentary about images of women in advertising, this ad would make me wince.  This image isn’t in the pages of a magazine like GQ or Esquire or Playboy, where it would still be problematic but at least reserved for the we-of-the-male-persuasion. This ad is plastered all over the city (taxis, busses, phone booths), which means kids see it and once they see it, they can’t un-see it. I don’t want my sons to think that a woman’s body is the equivalent of a downloadable “app” to be played with and then forgotten about; I don’t want them to think that a woman is a toy or that sex is as meaningless as a crapshoot. And I don’t want my niece or the daughters of my friends to grow up thinking these things either–or thinking that this woman’s body represents any sort of attainable or attractive ideal.

Yes, yes, I know, looking at this ad with my kids could be a “teaching moment,” blah blah blah. But it’s the 21st century, folks. Isn’t this sort of advertising straight out of Don Draper’s portfolio?  Why do so many ads still do the equivalent of blowing smoke in our faces and demanding that we follow them?

The only thing this ad got right, really, is the type of table underneath the woman: a craps table for a crap ad.

Oh I know, it’s because tomatoes that come out of grocery stores taste like cold wet cardboard that’s been briefly whisked through catsup.

So me and my tomatoes began a relationship. I watered and inspected the plants for bugs, wondered if anything could really grow 15 floors up in the midst of a hellish cross-town breeze and summer sun that beats down from dawn until 12:34 precisely, at which point it’s full shade and that damn breeze, which has shredded more flowering plants than I want to admit.  And that’s without the added atmospheric delight of bus exhaust wafting up from the bus stop downstairs, directly in front of our apartment. If the tomatoes actually grew, it crossed my mind that they might have absorbed so much carbon dioxide that they’d be toxic. 

Things went just swimmingly at first and then the leaves started doing some kind of crisping thing: little patches of mold appeared and then the leaves turned brown and shriveled up. I panicked but luckily, my facebook friends have among them a great deal of gardening sense. I separated the plants, decided against organic fertilizing items (when you’re growing edibles just above a bus stop, really at that point, what’s a little Miracle-Gro), invested in some chemicals,  and kept my fingers crossed.

Wouldn’t you know it? They grew! I actually grew tomatoes–about ten, to be exact–right there, above the bus stop and in spite of the breeze. Nature, eh? What a thing.

The leaves still look awful, but the tomatoes are so pretty, just like real tomatoes:

Their leaves look utterly diseased and wretched, though, don’t they? I think it’s sort of the same thing that happens to expectant mothers, in the month or so before they give birth: those staring dark-ringed eyes, the staggering walk, the face clenched with spasms of pain from backache, footache, indigestion…when it’s clear that the little baby-t0-be inside you is literally sucking away your life force.  I figure it’s all just getting us ready for the hit that personal grooming takes, post-partum, a phase that for women like Heidi Klum and Jessica Alba lasts about two weeks and for others of us….um, well, let’s just say that I’m thinking when son #1 hits 11 (he’s 9 now), I will have gotten a handle on the whole post-partum shlubbiness. Damn those celebumommies, making it harder on all the rest of us. I’m not sure what the tomato equivalent of Heidi Klum is, but I’m pretty sure it’s growing in a corporate greenhouse somewhere in Florida.

I picked seven of my tomatoes today; I’m hoping few that are still on the plant will continue to ripen.  Aren’t they beautiful?

I ate some for lunch today. They were still warm from the morning sun and so sweet that I remembered: a tomato is a FRUIT, people! A fruit! The cardboard grocery store kind have had the fruitiness bred right out of them, but these? Summer in your mouth.

And not the slightest hint of bus exhaust.

Next summer, I’m thinking corn.

(These tomatoes look particularly beautiful in their blue bowl, which is one of a set that our friend Nancy made for us.  She (and her beautiful pottery) will be at the Potter’s Market on the green in Watermill on Columbus Day weekend this year. You know you want to go to the East End for Columbus Day–often still warm, no crowds, you know the drill–and even store-bought tomatoes would look pretty in these bowls.)

I’m totally going–free yoga? heck yeah–but I have to wonder. How will they know we’re moms? So I imagine to myself the check-in policy tomorrow morning:

boobs like tube sox hanging down to your belly? check

sploodgy tummy from birthing babies? check

furrowed brow from deciphering lego instructions? check

perma-bags under the eyes from perpetual lack of sleep? check

yoga pants that were fashionable ten years ago (pre-children)? check

awake at 9AM on a Sunday morning because you weren’t at a totally hip bar Saturday evening? check

found your yoga class card in your jacket pocket along with 3 lifesavers, 2 small VERY IMPORTANT rocks, a half-eaten granola bar, and grimy napkin? check

have your hair in a ponytail with a sparkly Lil’Pony hair tie? check

And that’s how they’ll know we’re moms.

OM OM OM

Are tests really the answer to what ails our educational system? Hard to believe that it is…

Me:  That’s a cool sand castle, guys. Why are there two sections?

Liam: This section over here is where rich people live. And this section is for regular people.

Me: Oh. Where would we be?

Liam: Here. On the wall in the middle.

Me: On the wall?

Liam: Yeah. That’s where the medium people live.

I wonder what they plan to do with that big stick. Is it to beat the regular people into submission?  Seems to me that the boys have taken the whole ”first class” versus “coach” distinction way too seriously.

Caleb, the other morning, was busily coloring a picture of George Washington that he’d brought home from school.

“I know why George Washington was the first president,” he said, giving George a green face and brown hair.

“Why?” I asked

“Because he killed almost all the bad guys, of course.”

Let it not be said that my youngest son doesn’t have a nuanced view of history.  You don’t have to get rid of all the bad guys to be president, just most of them.

Someone tell Barack.

This post is a shout-out to my cousin’s wife Beth, who I always knew had a “knack” for candy and sweets (let’s just say that at a family dinner, you always want Beth to bring dessert. Not that she can’t cook other things wonderfully, but just…read on and you’ll see).

Beth and Will, my cousin, run Bigtips Candy, too, as well as some other cool ventures, and Beth has written not one but two books about sweets and chocolate, and she’s involved with the American Museum of Candy, which will open in 2011, in New Jersey.

And then yesterday: Martha. There was Beth, showing Martha how to make caramels. Not your run-of-the-mill Kraft caramels, oh no.

Caramels.  Goat butter and honey caramels with just a flick of sea salt across the top.

I would sell my children for a panful.

But because I recognize that children-for-candy bartering is illegal in the continental US, I will content myself with trying to make these caramels on my own, following Beth’s recipe to the letter. Because last month, at a family dinner?  She brought these for dessert and I only got one because I was too slow to the dessert table (very unlike me. I must have been coming down with something).

So should you call me in the next few days and I don’t answer the phone, it’s not that I’m not home. It’s just that my mouth will be full of caramel. Because I’m going to make an entire panful and I don’t plan to share.

As soon as we walked in, I realized why haircuts usually happen after school or much earlier in the day on the weekend: the small shop was filled with men, some flipping through magazines that Liam (had he seen them) would have called “inappropriate.”  A movie blared on the TV, blaring “inappropriate language”: every word some variation on fuck or shit. 

Okay. I’m not a prude (in fact, I’ve been told that I swear like a trucker) but this being my third day of Daddy’s-on-a-business-trip,  I was in no mood to answer questions like “why is he talking about cats?” and “what’s shooting up?”  So I tried to distract the boys with chitchat and lollipops, while the barber, a lovely Algerian man, asked them questions about soccer.

But then, in a moment of silence, one of the characters in the movie said “JESUS!” as he brandished a gun and ran out of the room.  Caleb’s clear voice echoed through the suddenly still barbershop: “JESUS? What’s JESUS?”

It’s moments like these where I rue my decision (comprised mostly of inertia) not to find any kind of religious instruction for my children, even if only so they have the rudiments of cultural literacy.

I scan the barbershop—several closely shaven men sport ornate crucifixes dangling from their necks; the Algerian barber is maybe Christian maybe not; there’s an older man in the corner who looks like he might be Jewish. Just another Saturday afternoon in New York…so I punt:  “um…well…Jesus was a man a long time ago who some people think helps them to be nicer to other people in the world.”

Caleb nodded.  “Can we watch soccer?” 

Thus endeth the lesson.