Hostile Dependency

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Cartoon of dog biting the hand that feeds it

Why is it that regions of the country with a high proportion of people who rely on the safety net tend to elect politicians who vow to slash it?

Many factors help explain this phenomenon. Differing world views and values, voter apathy, misinformation, and political manipulation of wedge issues all contribute. But the psychology of hostile dependency is also at play.

A New York Times article examines criticism of the safety net by those who increasingly depend on it. It notes that middle-class people who are angry at, but reliant on, government “are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it.”

Parents of adolescents may recognize this pattern. Teenagers, still dependent but longing to be free, often chafe against them. It’s an age-appropriate version of biting the hand that feeds you.

Hostile dependency suffuses not just families but politics. “Hands off my Medicare!,” shouted by anti-government protesters, echoes Get Out of My Life, but First Could You Drive Me & Cheryl to the Mall?, a popular book for parents of teens.

This sheds new light on today’s political landscape. America is a young country, with all the exuberance, idealism, frustration, and self-absorption of adolescence. Youth, combined with culturally ingrained tropes of freedom and self-reliance, define our national character.

It’s hard to integrate the equal imperatives of dependence and independence that define a well-balanced individual or society. Distinguishing between what fosters or stymies growth is not always clear. The task is further complicated by our national fixation on going it alone. We often mistake need for failure, abandonment for freedom.

Like the tumult of adolescence, perhaps this reactivity will subside as America moves toward a more secure identity in which interdependence is embraced rather than repudiated.

 

 

A Week to Remember

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Janine, my writing friend and guiding light of Write On, Mamas, keeps us inspired and productive by providing a constant stream of encouragement, writing opportunities, and writing prompts. This week’s was to write at least 100 words on Things I’d Like to Remember from this Week. Here’s mine–what would you like to remember?

Rainbow flag

I want to remember that this was a great week for Marriage Equality, with a conservative-dominated Supreme Court overturning the federal Defense of Marriage Act and allowing same-sex wedding bells to resume ringing in California. Supreme Court Building

I want to forget that those bells are still not allowed to ring in 37 states, and that the same Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act just the day before.

I want to remember that wanting to forget is no solution. Neither is opting out through demoralization. But I will probably resort to both.

Chimney emissionsI want to remember that this week President Obama took steps to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, and that he will probably disappoint me by approving the Keystone Pipeline in a few months.

I want to remember that staying committed through disappointment is a hallmark of maturity, and an absolute necessity for marriage, parenthood, friendship, and good citizenship.

I want to remember Wendy Davis in her pink sneakers preventing for a brief moment the erosion of women’s reproductive rights in Texas.

Wendy Davis's pink tennis shoes

I want to remember the miracle of Nelson Mandela, and that a good life comes not so much from miracles as from character and hard work.

Nelson Mandela

I want to remember that progress is a process of lurching back and forth.

 

 

 

Rupture

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broken heart symbol

“Why can’t you just be happy for me, and then go home and talk behind my back later, like a normal person?”

So laments Lillian to Annie as their once-close friendship derails in the 2011 hit movie, Bridesmaids.

Lillian (played by Maya Rudolph) and Annie (Kristin Wiig) have been best friends since before they had breasts. Nothing can come between them—they share keys to each other’s apartments, secret glances, and a talent for skewering men’s sexual habits. Annie’s been sleeping with a cad since her business and relationship went bust. Lillian’s convinced her boyfriend is about to break up with her. But the men are a sideshow to the true bond. Over coffee and chocolate cake, Lillian and Annie laughingly propose to one another, “Will you marry me?” “Yes!” they both exclaim.

Instead Lillian gets engaged to Doug, and Annie responds with, “Oh, my God! What is happening?” Lillian and her fiancé coo to one another over the phone; when Lillian tells him how happy Annie is for them, Annie calls from the background, “No I’m not!” Her forced, manic laughter quickly subsides into a crestfallen expression as the contrast in their life trajectories becomes all too clear. Still, there’s no question that Lillian wants her best friend to be her maid of honor, and that Annie is honored indeed. She’ll put on a happy face despite her misery, and even sincerely mean it.

Until she meets Helen, Lillian’s new friend, who is richer, prettier, thinner, better connected—and who never misses an opportunity to flaunt it over Annie. Worse, it appears Helen has supplanted Annie as Lillian’s best friend.

Hilarity ensues as envy, competition, anger, galloping diarrhea, and all hell break loose.

Shit happens when there’s disparity between best friends, or between what they profess and what they feel. Especially when someone else comes between them. I can relate. What woman can’t?

In my case, my best friend, Sharon, responded to my engagement with, “How bourgeois!” She was my maid of honor, and although she didn’t ground any planes en route to the Bachelorette party, she was late to the wedding and called me a Nazi for being uptight.

Of course it’s more complicated than that. Sharon was never as rotten as our bridal saga makes her sound. Years before, when we took a four-month, post-college trip, she even nursed me tenderly through my own episode of galloping diarrhea in a Tel Aviv youth hostel after an unfortunate encounter with unwashed strawberries. Besides, I was often a Nazi.

We had a long history of ups and downs, chortling over in-jokes but also treading carefully amid landmines. Sometimes a misstep would lead to a blow-up, until we couldn’t bear the distance anymore–our conciliatory letters often crossed in the mail. Eventually our signals got hopelessly crossed. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember feeling like I’d been punched in the gut. Our final rupture knocked the wind out of me for years.

My break-up with Sharon is not unusual. The details vary, but practically every woman I know has a rupture story, complete with endless obsession and wounds that take forever to heal. Sometimes the rift is mutual and obvious. Often it’s silent, with one or both friends claiming that everything’s fine while secretly feeling adrift, even hostile. As Lillian’s opening remark reminds us, it’s normal for friends to be two-faced.

But why? Why are ruptures in women’s friendships so common? And so painful?

What do you think? Can best friends ever live happily ever after?

 

 

Ten Minutes

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Diet Coke can

“Did you know that every Diet Coke takes 10 minutes off your life?” my daughters asked.

Their campaign to break my habit reminded me of myself at their age, on a crusade to get my mother to stop smoking three packs a day. My daughters never tried to flush my Diet Coke down the toilet, as I often did with my mother’s cigarettes, but their worry was the same. And although I generally only quaffed a can a day and did not poison them with second-hand backwash, I was the same as my mother: I ignored the concerns of my loved ones.

“Ten minutes!” I replied. “So what?”

I did a quick calculation. If I drank one Diet Coke a day for 40 years to come, that would mean 101 days off of my life. Double that, to allow for hyper-caffeinated days plus all the diet soda I’d imbibed since adolescence till this moment of truth with my adolescents. We were still only talking about 202 days off the long life I envisioned ahead of me.

“That’s way less than a year!” I told my daughters. “It’s worth it.”

Years passed as I merrily sipped away. Then I was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of uterine cancer. Different calculations preoccupied me: Would I see my daughters marry? Get to babysit their children? Make it to my youngest daughter’s graduation from college in a few months? How long till Christmas? I craved every one of those 202 days I’d been so blithely willing to forfeit. Every ten minutes might help me reach some important milestone.

I swore off Diet Coke the day I was diagnosed, and haven’t touched a drop since. It’s not that I think it caused my cancer (“If only figuring out what causes cancer were that easy!” said my Kaiser nutritionist). Since Diet Coke was about my only vice if you don’t count chocolate, I spend very little time blaming myself. Cancer happens. To a lot of us.

Since those dark early days, I’ve learned that my cancer was detected at the earliest possible stage, and that my prognosis is excellent. I should have many, many good years ahead of me. But they’ll be free of Diet Coke.

It’s my pledge to my daughters. I can’t promise them that I won’t eventually succumb—to something, if not cancer. But I can promise to give up Diet Coke.

 

 

Transitions

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Trash bags

Every family has a pack rat. In ours, it’s Emma, my 25-year-old daughter. I’ve bequeathed Winchester, the moth-bitten stuffed panda from my childhood, to her. She’s the only one in the family I trust not to mistake him for trash. An artist, Emma sees the potential in everything. You’d be surprised what you can do with scraps of paper and odd socks.

Emma’s room is like an archaeological dig—prehistoric Legos followed by the era of My Little Ponies, which in turn are overlaid with the Beanie Baby then the Barbie strata. Pat the Bunny coexists peacefully with Harry Potter, and a history of girls’ fashion resides in Emma’s dresser drawers. The artwork papering her walls ranges from pre-K scribbles to sophisticated masterpieces on canvases she stretched and framed herself.

Ever since Emma left for college, I’ve been nagging her to go through her stuff. Sometimes I threaten to toss it all myself if she won’t. But Emma recognizes a hoarder by proxy when she sees one. She knows I’ve kept vigil over her room like a shrine since she’s been gone. I’m not ready to throw away Emma’s Girl Scout swaps—little bits of felt tokens exchanged around years of campfires—anymore than she’s been.

But Emma’s ready now. After a lengthy and sometimes tortured path through college, she’s stopped fighting the inexorable slide into adulthood. At last she’s cleaning out her room with a vengeance in preparation for moving to the opposite coast. Bag after bag of old papers, clothes, the detritus of long-gone years are finding their way into areas designated for Goodwill, recycling, or trash.

I pull things out of the discard pile, nagging replaced by laments.

“Are you sure you want to get rid of this?” I ask, fingering an old sketchbook. What if Emma is the next Picasso?

She’s sure.

“You’re not going to get rid of Winchester, are you?” I say.

Emma smiles. “Don’t worry, Mom.”

But of course I will. Now I’ll have to sort out  my own transition.

 

Domestic Surveillance

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NSA SealNow that we’ve learned that the NSA is routinely mining data from Verizon and other huge communication corporations under the rationale of stopping terrorism, how about some more user-friendly applications?

For instance, I’ve got a stack of Verizon call details I need to analyze to see which of the hundreds of numbers we call should go into our “Frequently Called Numbers” list of ten freebies. Are my short but numerous calls to a local number burning up more minutes than my long monthly chat with my brother in Massachusetts? Who, by the way, is my daughter calling in Albuquerque? And is he treating her right?

Verizon logoIt would save me a lot of time, money, and anxiety if the NSA could just take a minute from their Al-Queda-hunting number-crunching and run my numbers. God knows an assist from the NSA would be a lot faster than waiting for our daughters to respond to my request for the numbers they call most often, or to tell us about anyone significant in their lives. On a slow day, maybe the NSA could even order a little domestic drone surveillance on the girls’ young gentlemen callers.

It’s a clear win-win: the Administration quells a PR nightmare by helping families across America save money on their phone bills and get clued in to their children’s lives. Who cares about a little erosion of civil liberties in exchange for better household management?