Opinionator | Private Lives: A Mother’s Ambitions

Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.

If I'm lucky, I might have as long as two hours to work. I riffle through the stack of research articles on substance use, pull out a few relevant ones, and begin revising my paper's introduction. I've just gotten in the groove when a sweet singsong voice drifts over from the room next door: "Mommy, I have to go to the baaaa-throom!"

About a hundred years ago, before my first child was born, I lived in a totally different universe. Just a few years after completing my Ph.D. in psychology, I was on the path to what I considered possible research greatness. I had been awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health to conduct research on treatments for couples in which one partner has an addiction. Throughout my pregnancy, I was working on a new grant proposal that, if approved, would set me up for a promotion to assistant professor.

I recall going for a waddling pregnant walk with my husband and, feeling confident, saying how excited I was to become a mom, and how positive I was that I would still want to have my career. I thought about the research on working versus nonworking moms, suggesting that what was best for children was a happy mom, whether she worked or stayed home with her children.

But then my son was born, and everything changed. Something seemed to physically shift inside me. Being apart from him was viscerally uncomfortable. I cried often in those first months of leaving him at day care to go sit at my desk to analyze data and work on grants and papers. I wanted so badly to want my career. I had worked so hard to get there. But as I strained to finish my postdoctoral fellowship, it seemed as if I no longer had the stomach to do what was needed to achieve my goals.

Mentors counseled me that if I stayed on track, my career would be so flexible. And really, it already was flexible. I didn't even go in to work every day, and that entire first year, I was able to visit my baby every day at his day care to nurse him for his midday feeding. No one was angry with me when my productivity didn't go back to where it had been pre-baby, which speaks volumes about my colleagues.

Photo Credit Jordan Crane

But I felt like a constant disappointment. I felt the ever present pressure of needing to be writing a new grant or paper, needing to keep up on the literature. And I hated knowing that my mentors and colleagues were not terribly impressed with me anymore.

Spending more time with my child wasn't my only consideration in what to do with my career. There was also my identity (who was I, if not a clinical psychologist and researcher and a generally ambitious person?), my sanity (could I really be home with a baby every day?), and the practical matter of my family's finances (my income was needed to maintain our lifestyle). So finally, after months of agonizing, I made a decision: to back down, but not bail out.

Today, after the birth of my second child, 15 percent of my income is paid through my university for my research, and I work another two days a week as a private-practice psychologist. This setup allows me to be engaged in multiple roles, as a researcher, therapist and home-based mom.

But it also means that my productivity within each role is limited.
My kids are probably the most satisfied — they enjoy our days home together, and they also love going to day care with their friends. But my patients get frustrated with my limited availability, and my colleagues at the university sometimes seem baffled by my desire to stay in academia in a way that is not particularly ambitious or impressive.

The real problem, however, is me. I certainly wish that I didn't still feel like a postdoctoral fellow, salary-wise, after the ridiculous number of years of school I've completed, and I wish that my house and lifestyle weren't so much smaller and simpler than those of my close friends who stayed on competitive career tracks. More painful, though, is sitting in on a research meeting, listening to my colleagues bounce around new project ideas and talk about complex data analytics or new methods of biological verification of substance use that can be incorporated into grant applications. Where I used to feel like a member of the group, and a leader on some projects, I now feel a half step behind.

I find ways to be valuable to my team in the time I am able to allot, but the fact is that I am in a field where incredibly smart people live and breathe the work that I spend only a small number of hours doing. There is absolutely no chance that I will be promoted to associate professor, and I will continue to be an unknown in my research community. No one is going to ask me to speak about my scientific contributions, because, in all honesty, I just haven't contributed enough.

I tell myself that maybe when my kids are older, I can return to my former goals. But there is a distinct possibility that by then, many doors will have closed for me, and it is a certainty that others who didn't pull back from work will be miles ahead.

There are hundreds of stay-at-home-mom blogs written about the trials and tribulations of being home with the kids, and numerous books about moms' making it big in the workplace while having a family. But I don't see much from women like me, who back down but not out of work.

Maybe that's because our culture, especially the culture around work, is so all or nothing, and because the pressures to do more and reach higher are ubiquitous. That's as it should be; ambition makes our world move forward. But could it be possible that greatness can also mean finding ways to increase the amount of happiness in the world, even if that work happens on a tiny stage that can be seen and applauded by few, except perhaps by a pudgy 1-year-old and a chatty 4-year-old? Right or wrong, I tell myself that it is.

---

Yael Chatav Schonbrun is a psychologist and an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | The Stone: Detroit’s Drought of Democracy

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

I.

On Tuesday, Kevyn Orr, the emergency manager of Detroit, transferred control of the city's water and sewage board to the elected mayor, Mike Duggan. In his statement, Orr wrote, "As the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department works to operate more efficiently and communicate more effectively with customers, it is important to ensure there are clear lines of management and accountability." Orr's actions are a result of sustained and heroic activism by Detroit citizens, and a concomitant international outcry. Still, any victory they may be tempted to claim remains tenuous. Clause 6 of the order reads, "The EM may modify, amend, rescind, replace, supplement, or otherwise revise this Order at any time." So, for example, Orr remains in control of any decision about eventual privatization of the utility. Nevertheless, Orr's provisional move of transferring authority back to an elected official is a step in the direction of recognizing the wisdom of our founding fathers.

In "Federalist No. 10," James Madison addressed the "dangerous vice" of faction, the "common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." Madison rejected appointing unelected experts to solve the problems raised by factions, and offered, as the best solution to the thorny difficulty of competing interests, the idea of representative government as a way of "controlling its effects." Madison's solution to the problem of factionalism is a government of representatives, who are accountable to the people via the mechanism of elections.

Elections, however, can be problematic, as people can make choices that are not in their own best interests. The state of Michigan has undertaken a remarkable course to deal with the inefficiencies inherent in democratic accountability by appointing "emergency" managers who are essentially free from such accountability, in the hopes that they will be able to make politically unpopular decisions for the sake of overall efficiency — and allegedly the public good.

It's worthwhile to examine Michigan's experiment in challenging the wisdom of our founding fathers with an eye toward addressing two questions. First, has Michigan's experiment resulted in policy that does maximally serve the public good? And second, in what sense is Michigan's experiment consistent with the basic principles of democracy?

II.

On March 16, 2011, the Republican Michigan State Legislature, with the backing of the Republican governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, passed Public Act 4. The bill provides "for the appointment of an emergency manager" who will replace democratically elected local officials in making decisions about "expenditures, investments, and the provision of services by units of local government," including "modification or termination of contracts," in cases of supposed financial emergency. In November 2012, the citizens of the state of Michigan voted to repeal Public Act 4. The Michigan Legislature responded to the rejection of Public Act 4 by passing Public Act 436, essentially reinstating it, and the governor signed it into law in December 2012.

In March 2013, Governor Snyder appointed Orr as emergency manager of Detroit. Orr claims that Detroit has over 18 billion dollars in long-term debt. However, extensive independent analysis by the think tank Demos has raised troubling questions about the accuracy of the claims of financial exigency; the Demos report calls the figure of $18 billion, "irrelevant to analysis of Detroit's insolvency and bankruptcy filing, highly inflated and, in large part, simply inaccurate." In any case, speculative assumptions about long-term debt are irrelevant to the question of bankruptcy, which is a matter not of eventual long-term debt, but of cash flow shortfall, currently pegged at $198 million. The Demos report argues that "[t]he biggest contributing factor to the increase in Detroit's legacy expenses is a series of complex deals it entered into in 2005 and 2006" with banks. The deals made with Detroit are widely regarded as suspicious.

Orr has not vigorously challenged the legality of the contracts that have led Detroit and the utilities that serve it to transfer huge sums to the banks. He has also not attacked the state's decision to invest $284 million dollars of taxpayer money in a new hockey arena in Detroit. Orr has chosen instead to make the citizens of Detroit bear the brunt of the financial pain. City services have been slashed. Detroit is a city that sits atop the world's greatest reserve of fresh water, the Great Lakes. Yet Detroit is shutting off water to customers who are more than two months late on their bills and who owe $150 or more. So far, about 2 percent of Detroit's citizens have had their water cut off; nearly half are under threat. Single mothers are heating up (expensive) store-bought water in microwaves to clean their children's faces; the disabled are hobbling down the streets to fill buckets to flush their toilets. During this time, the debts of golf clubs and hockey arenas have largely been ignored.

Related

More From The Stone

Read previous contributions to this series.

Shutting off water for nonpayment is technically legal. As a matter of public administration, however, rapidly cutting off water to such a large percentage of a city is extraordinary. Writing for The Guardian, Martin Lukacs argues that Orr's focus on privatizing the water utility, "a prized resource worth billions," turns the shut-offs into "a way to make the balance-sheet more attractive in the lead up to its privatization." But privatizing the water utility is a further step in removing public accountability.  The discretion inherent in executive power is being exercised to maximize financial efficiency. But there is no obvious connection between financial efficiency and the public good. It is true that debt to future generations is a kind of restriction on their freedom. But so is cutting off their access to water, even though that step may be financially efficient. In general, one can expect that the most draconian possible interpretation and execution of the legal code will be carried out if the goal is to maximize profit, and the mechanism for public accountability is lifted.

The 19^th-century French political philosopher Benjamin Constant worried that appeals to the common good were often not made for democratic purposes, but rather served to "supply weapons and pretexts to all kinds of tyranny." One may suspect Michigan's appeal to financial efficiency has a similar purpose. This brings us to the second question, that of its democratic legitimacy.

III.

A democratic culture is one that values free individual choice in making a life plan. In the case of a community, as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King reminds us in "Letter From Birmingham Jail," this means that the policies that are binding on citizens are decided by those citizens or (as in our own democracy) representatives who are accountable to citizens. Such a system requires a culture of political equality among the citizens, what some call a culture of equal respect. As Plato wrote in "The Republic": "The utmost freedom for the majority is reached in [a democratic city] when bought slaves, both male and female, are no less free than those who bought them. And I almost forgot to mention the extent of the legal equality of men and women and of the freedom in the relations between them."

Plato was a harsh critic of democracy, a position that derived from the fact that his chief value for a society was social efficiency. In Plato's view, most people are not capable of employing their autonomy to make the right choices, that is, choices that maximize overall efficiency. Michigan is following Plato's recommendation to handle the problems raised by elections. Though there are many different senses of "liberty" and "autonomy," none mean the same thing as "efficiency." Singapore is a state that values efficiency above all. But by no stretch of the imagination is Singapore a democratic state. A society ruled by technocrats who make decisions on behalf of the masses is, since Plato's time, regarded as a system that is opposed to democracy, rather than one exemplifying it.

Plato's ideal state involves rule by experts, city planners guided by the principles of justice, who rule over skilled craftsmen and mere physical laborers. The philosophers decide which pursuits are suited for which members of society, and educate them accordingly. Plato chose those with a "philosophical nature" to play this role, because he argued that only "a lover of learning and wisdom" could be "gentle toward his own and those he knows."

Plato was aware of the need, in his ideal state, for the rulers to be selfless. There is good reason to believe that in Michigan the financial managers who are supposed to ensure "efficiency" are not like Plato's philosophers. After all, for whom are these policies efficient? Surely not for the Detroit residents whose children cannot drink water, bathe or flush toilets in the midst of summer. Or for those who suffer from the drastic cutbacks in all city services. This is not to deny that the Detroit emergency manager's policies are efficient for some people. For example, they are efficient for the banks that are being paid back for what look to be ethically dubious loans, as well as for those who stand to benefit from the potentially huge profits of privatizing one of the world's great freshwater supplies at a time of increasing global water scarcity.

But let us suppose for the sake of argument that the emergency manager, like Plato's philosopher rulers, made decisions that were efficient for all. For example, suppose the benefits of privatizing southeastern Michigan's freshwater utility were to flow not to private investors in the company, but to the nearly four million Michigan residents it serves. It matters not. The actions of Michigan's governor and Legislature would be no less anti-democratic. In a democracy, one cannot replace democratically elected officials in the interest of efficiency. It is not that Public Acts 4 and 436 are morally wrong. Rather, they have no place in a democracy. It is simply no surprise at all that a democratic state can be less efficient than some nondemocratic states. In a democracy, someone who would be a good doctor is allowed to be a bad lawyer. Autonomy cannot be subsumed to efficiency in a democracy.

The Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt was a fierce critic of liberal democracy. He argued that liberal democracy was incoherent because of what he called the problem of the exception. In emergency situations, there is not enough time to act democratically. In an emergency, someone would have to declare an exception to suspend the normal democratic process and handle the emergency. Schmitt argued that whoever had the power to declare an emergency situation and override the democratic process would be tempted to overuse that power, and declare nonemergency situations to be states of exception. This person would be in effect the sovereign.

The language of the emergency manager laws is that of exception. Calling the situation an "emergency," and the undemocratically selected financial manager an "emergency manager" is nothing other than a declaration of the anti-democratic nature of what has occurred. Detroit does not face an immediate threat from a hostile invading army. To suppose that financial exigency or advancing an agenda of privatization for corporate gain are reasons to suspend democracy is to capitulate to its worst enemies.

The chief values of democracy are freedom and equality. The  willingness to subsume freedom to claims of efficiency is one sign of an undemocratic culture. Toleration of the denial of fresh water to others is another. After all, it is hard to imagine denying fresh water to those one regards as political equals. The pressure that has resulted in the decision by Detroit's emergency manager to turn back control of the water department to the mayor, however temporary, is, one can hope, one small sign that the drought in Detroit's democracy  may be ending.

Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of "Knowledge and Practical Interests," "Know How," "Language in Context" and the forthcoming "Why Propaganda Matters."

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | Draft: That Would Make a Good Novel

Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

Sometime in late 2005, on one of our first outings together, my friend Cornelia took me to her favorite used bookstore in Portland, Me. The store, once thriving, was closing its doors. The stacks had been picked over, and all that remained were some used cookbooks and a smattering of other genres. I have had moments in used bookstores when I feel destiny pushing me toward an obscure title, but that day I felt nothing, no sign or vibration coming from any of the odd, unwanted books. But because Cornelia was a new friend and had driven me into the city to show me this store that she hadn't known was going out of business, I grabbed a beat-up biography of Margaret Mead and took it to the counter.

I love the idea of biographies — the snooping and eavesdropping and rifling through old letters and journals, as well as the stepping back to see the subjects in the context of their family, time and culture — but they often sit on my shelves unread. As much as I want to know the stories they are packed with, narratives of fact rarely capture, for me, life in the way I like it to be captured on the page. Those real-life details often aren't enough, or are too many, or are just not the right ones to bring a moment quiveringly to life in the way of a good novel, whose conversations and furniture and lovemaking feel as if they are truly happening while your eye passes over the words. And there is a claustrophobia that comes over me, a palpable sensation of feeling stuck in a place where everything has already happened. When I read biographies, I am too aware of these confines, that we are each, the biographer and I, chained by the ankle to fact, and cannot let our imaginations soar.

Despite this strong and perhaps unfair prejudice, I did end up reading "Margaret Mead: A Life," by Jane Howard. Or at least I read up through the part when she was doing fieldwork in what was then the Territory of New Guinea with her husband, Reo Fortune, and they meet — and she falls in love with — the only other anthropologist in the area, Gregory Bateson. I stopped there and went back and read the section again. It is a short chapter: twelve pages, covering a strange, patchily documented period in her life. That would make a good novel, I thought. Just those months in the Territory of New Guinea in 1933. Such an interesting novel. For someone else. Someone who writes that kind of thing.

That would make a good novel. It's a thought you have regularly as a novelist. You go to a friend's house for dinner and you overhear a small, loaded exchange between her and her husband in the kitchen and a whole story starts spooling out while you are tossing the salad you brought. You don't write it down and by morning the idea is gone, washed away like the rest of the flotsam that seemed for a delusional moment to be able to carry several hundred pages, but ends up bobbing off somewhere mentally inaccessible.

But the Margaret Mead idea did not bob off. The novel I was working on then was hard going and emotional. It required long breaks, and during those breaks my imagination began to slip off to those three anthropologists trying to piece together the great spectrum of human behavior while trying to master their own.

Photo Credit Eleanor Taylor

Even though I was quite sure that I could not write a novel based in fact and set in 1933 in the Territory of New Guinea, that I did not even want to write a novel like that — I didn't read "historical fiction" for the same reason I didn't read biographies — I wanted to know more. I read "Coming of Age in Samoa," the book that made Mead famous in her 20s and "Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist" by David Lipset. I read the two books that came out of their field work in New Guinea: Mead's "Sex and Temperament" and Bateson's "Naven." (Fortune, I discovered, never published a book in his lifetime.) I read Mead's published letters and her memoir, "Blackberry Winter." I bought a green notebook and filled it with notes. I went back to my novel. I stopped again and started a novella about a love triangle between a doctor, a musician and a frustrated poet — a contemporary love triangle that required zero research. For several years my notes were mainly details about the Sepik River, about raw bat and sago pancakes, scarification and infanticide, bride prices and mosquito bags. Until the day I finally wrote a few sentences in the back of my green notebook. "As we left the Mundugumor, someone threw something at us. It landed in the water, bobbed beside the stern of the boat. (Pale brown thing.)"

Once I had those words, it became a novel. I saw it. I felt it. It was that fast, like a gas becoming a solid in an instant.

For a long time after that it remained three rough sentences in pencil at the back of my green notebook. But it was enough. I continued to read about Mead, about anthropology, about the Sepik river tribes.

I planned to tell the whole story in Mead's voice, use all the real names and stick to the facts I had. There were enough gaps in the published historical record, I thought, in which my imagination could frolic. I'd done the reading with a squint, wanting to know things but not too many things. My research needed to be like an undergarment in the days before people started showing off their boxers and their bra straps. I didn't want any of it to show through.

My green notebook was filled as much with what could happen as what did happen. A detail gleaned from my reading would trigger a whole possible scene, which I would write below the factual tidbit and mark with a star. When I returned to that initial research, I was surprised by the number of stars, how many ideas I already had. My reading and note-taking were laced with, perhaps driven by, my impulse to make things up.

When I teach fiction I often start a workshop with one of my favorite exercises called Two Truths and a Lie. I tell my students to write the first paragraph of a short story. The first sentence of the paragraph must be true (My sister has brown hair.), the second sentence must be true (Her name is Lisa.), but the third sentence must be a lie (Yesterday she went to prison.). What I forgot when conceiving of this book is that it's the lie that brings the story to life, makes it hum. The lie is the steering wheel, the gearshift and the engine. The lie takes your two true sentences and makes a left turn off road and straight into the woods. It slams the story into fifth gear and guns it.

By the end of the first chapter, all the lies I'd had to tell to create scenes and dialogue had driven my novel of historical fact directly away from history. Even the one line of dialogue I knew — "You're tired," is what Bateson supposedly first said to Mead — didn't work in my made-up scene. My three anthropologists were on their way to becoming entirely their own people, with their own instincts and impulses and responses. Soon they would have their own names, their own particular passions, and leave Mead and Fortune and Bateson far behind.

Still, I thought, I was writing the story of an American scientist whose voice became louder and farther reaching than perhaps any other woman's of her era, one of the few female voices that was heard at all during most of the 20th century. Then I wrote the second chapter from the Englishman's point of view, and found the real voice of the novel. It took me a long time after that — years, in fact — to admit that this book wasn't her story. It was his.

In real life, at the end of their five months on the Sepik, Mead, Fortune and Bateson went to Sydney and stayed there for another three months, trying to sort out their feelings for one another. In September of 1933, Mead and Bateson got on separate ships, she to America, he to England, while Fortune remained in Australia. Absolutely nothing was settled between any of them.

It became clear that my own tale was not going to end on the quay in Sydney Harbor. For a long time I didn't know what would happen, only that I had the freedom to find out. I had slipped out of the shackles of history, made a clean break with fact. And I set off into the jungle of my imagination.

---

Lily King is the author of four novels. Her latest, "Euphoria," came out in June.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Room for Debate: Are 'Starchitects' Ruining Cities?

Witold Rybczynski, the architect and emeritus professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, complained recently about "starchitects" who often work in cities they are unfamiliar with, creating buildings that are out of sync with their surroundings. In an interview, he argued in favor of local architectural talent, or "locatecture."

Are superstar architects ruining city skylines?

Read the Discussion »

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | Disunion: A Civil War Love Story

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

In 1846 Arabella Wharton Griffith, a 22-year-old from rural New Jersey, moved to New York City to take a position as governess. Armed with a vibrant personality and keen intellect, she soon found herself in a circle of well-connected, literary-minded socialites, artists and prominent politicians, including the inveterate diarist George Templeton Strong. She was, he wrote, "certainly the most brilliant, cultivated, easy graceful, effective talker of womankind, and has read, thought, and observed much and well."

Shortly before the Civil War, Arabella met Francis Channing Barlow, who had been raised by his mother in the intellectual hothouses of Brook Farm and Concord, Mass. After graduating from Harvard, Barlow moved to New York where he commenced a legal career. Arabella was a decade older than Frank, as his friends called him, but the age difference didn't seem to matter: The couple married on April 20th, 1861, the same day that, following President Abraham Lincoln's call for volunteers, Barlow enlisted in the Union Army.

The next year Arabella followed him into service, volunteering as a nurse in the United States Sanitary Commission, the forerunner of the Red Cross. On Sept. 16, 1862, she arrived on the battlefield of Antietam, just in time to see her husband carried off the field with a piece of case shot in his groin.

Arabella took immediate control of her husband's care, first in a military hospital, and then in a private room she had arranged. Her friend Strong, who was a prominent official in the Sanitary Commission, encountered her one afternoon in a military camp – "unattended, but serene and self-possessed as if walking down Broadway."

Barlow, who had been promoted to brigadier general while in recovery, was back in action in time for the next year's campaigning season. On July 1, 1863, the first day of Gettysburg, his division held a rise on the federal right called Blocker's Knoll (now Barlow's Knoll). A massive Confederate attack smashed his lines, and Barlow suffered a grievous wound through his left side as his men retreated. As he was being carried off the field, a spent ball hit him in the back, and after he fell another rebel bullet grazed his thumb. He was captured and brought behind Confederate lines.

What happened next became one of the great legends of the war, and turned Arabella and Frank into one of the most celebrated couples of 1860s America. Responding to the entreaties of a seemingly dying foe, Confederates sent word to Arabella, who was on the battlefield with the Sanitary Commission. She immediately set out to cross into Confederate-occupied Gettysburg. Exactly how she managed to enter the village is unclear. One story has her running into rebel lines under fire from both armies without being hit; most likely, after a series of official exchanges, the Confederates granted her permission to attend her husband.

In any case, Gettysburg civilians saw her on horseback being escorted by Confederate soldiers on the night of July 2. Both Confederate and Union surgeons had declared Barlow's wound fatal. But under his wife's care, Frank defied the prognostications and began another slow but steady recovery.

As he slowly rebuilt his strength, Arabella moved him first to Baltimore, and then to her hometown, Somerville. She saw to it that he did not fall from the public eye, and organized as much social life as his condition would bear. In autumn, the couple visited Boston, where they stayed with Julia Ward Howe, author of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic"; they later went to New York, where they caught up with their high-society friends from before the war.

Barlow returned to the Army of the Potomac in time for Ulysses S. Grant's 1864 Overland Campaign against Robert E. Lee. In command of the First Division, Second Corps, he was soon immersed in the bloodiest fighting of the war, while Arabella served in the Army field hospitals nearby.

While the federal forces dueled with Lee at Spotsylvania from May 8 to 20, Arabella was stationed at the Rappahannock town of Fredericksburg, which had been turned into a massive federal troop and supply depot. The small river town also acted as the receiving station for the wounded. Under Clara Barton's direction, Arabella augmented her usual nursing duties with the supervision of the "special diet kitchens" at her hospital.

Arabella's reputation for dedication and resourcefulness was forged during the Overland Campaign. Nicknamed "the Raider," she scoured villages and the countryside for supplies. Though Frank was seldom more than 10 miles away, the incessant fighting made visits impossible.

Repulsed by Lee at Cold Harbor, Grant sent the Army of the Potomac across the James River toward Petersburg, the railroad juncture that supplied Richmond. Despite achieving initial surprise, Grant failed to take the city, resulting in a nine-month semi-siege punctuated by vicious battles.

In early June, as the two armies dug in, Grant turned the small waterfront landing at City Point into an enormous manpower and material depot. It also became the new medical center for the Army of the Potomac, and Arabella was among the many nurses who journeyed from White House to City Point. Upon arrival, she made her way to Frank's First Division hospital, and was distributing food and drink to the wounded by June 18.

Though undoubtedly pleased by his wife's presence, Barlow grew apprehensive over her health. Disease killed more men than gunfire during the war, and nurses and doctors were not immune. By the time Barlow got to her, she was already exhibiting early signs of typhus, a common killer that she most likely caught while ministering to the sick and wounded in the military camps and hospitals in the Virginia low country.

Despite failing health, she had kept at her duties in the hot, humid Tidewater environment. Only when she collapsed at the hospital did the full extent of her affliction become clear. She was taken to Washington, where she could stay with friends.

Arabella did not remain in Washington for long. Perhaps feeling improved and eager to be near Frank, she returned to the front. But the disease had her in its grip. On July 2, Barlow wrote his family that Arabella was dangerously sick and "all run down with a fever." Four days later, Frank, unable to leave his command, walked her from his headquarters to the First Division field hospital, where one of the division surgeons escorted her to the transports at City Point. From there she took a steamer back to Washington.

Related

Disunion Highlights

Explore multimedia from the series and navigate through past posts, as well as photos and articles from the Times archive.

There she seemed to rally again, and on July 15, Barlow received word that her fever had broken, and he looked forward to her full recovery. But it was premature: On July 28, after leading an attack at Deep Bottom on the James, Barlow received word that Arabella had died the previous day.

Theodore Lyman, a friend and staff officer, described Barlow as "entirely incapacitated by this sudden grief," and stories spread among the troops that Arabella's death "had driven Barlow insane." Distraught but not insane, Frank received a 15-day leave to arrange his wife's funeral. She was buried in Somerville, N.J., where her white marble gravestone still stands.

Barlow returned to New York after the war, held a series of governmental offices, and commenced a successful legal practice. In 1867, he married Ellen Shaw, sister of Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the 54th Massachusetts at Ft. Wagner, S.C. They had three children.

But the memory of Arabella never left him. As he lay near death in December 1895, Barlow's mind kept returning to her and her devotion to him and the Union during the war. "The finest monument in this country" would be built to commemorate the "loyal women of the Civil War," he assured a visiting friend. There was no doubt whose life and character inspired the prediction.

Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.

---

Richard F. Welch, who teaches history at Farmingdale State College, is the author of "The Boy General: The Life and Careers of Francis Channing Barlow."

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | Menagerie: Earthlings, Anarchists and Other Animals

Menagerie: Just between us species.

I.

I was watching a "60 Minutes" report on YouTube when I realized I could burn down a logging station. The 2005 report, called "Burning Rage," told the story of the environmental extremist group the Earth Liberation Front, which the United States government had come to regard as its greatest domestic "terrorist" threat. At the time, the E.L.F. was responsible for over a 1,000 actions, including the most financially destructive act of domestic terrorism ever recorded: One of its autonomous cells had set fire to a $23 million housing development outside San Diego, completely destroying it.

I was watching this because the E.L.F. activist Daniel McGowan had recently signed a plea agreement ending a long trial for setting fire to the offices of Superior Lumber in Glendale, Ore., causing over $400,000 in damage. By temporarily shutting down Superior Lumber's operations, McGowan and five other activists delayed the untimely deaths of untold numbers of trees and animals whose habitats were being clear-cut. McGowan looked like a hero to me and to others in the movement.

Seeing the twisted, charred remains of the San Diego housing development flicker across my computer screen, I thought of all I could do with my own hands, and my anger.

It was 2006 and I was 22. I had been an ethical vegan for only a short time, but was already beginning to learn about organizations like the E.L.F., the Animal Liberation Front (A.L.F.), and Earth First! thinkers like the green-anarchist philosopher John Zerzan, and bands like Gather and Earth Crisis, who made hard-core punk music about animal liberation. Seeing the twisted, charred remains of the San Diego housing development flicker across my computer screen, I thought of all I could do with my own hands, and my anger. I cared passionately about protecting other species and decided to act.

Photo In a 1990 photo from the Animal Liberation Front, two activists posed after removing 82 beagles and 26 rabbits from a laboratory in Cambridge, England.Credit

My boyfriend and I began penning a manifesto and planning our own actions, studying manuals for lockpicking and building incendiary devices. The anarchist sites we frequented gave us directions for reproducing zines from PDFs, so we began to distribute them out of my boyfriend's apartment and called our distro Black Masque. We watched countless videos shot surreptitiously inside vivisection laboratories and slaughterhouses, and read deeply about rewilding and primitivism, talking about how we'd help take down the sick system, then live in a treehouse in the mountains and grow our own food.

Seven years later, I've still never carried out an action. My boyfriend and I split up and I moved back home. I got a job in a coffee shop and life took over. Before long, I wasn't even vegan anymore.

II.

My parents are ethical vegetarians but left it up to me to decide on my own. When I was 10, I did, after finding a PETA pamphlet about animal rights at my friend's house and bringing it home. I remember the rankling feeling I had after calling the 800 number on my toothpaste tube a few days later and asking a woman if the company tested its toothpaste on animals. I found out it did, but I didn't stop using it — back then, I didn't know there were alternatives. Throughout most of middle and high school, I was the vegetarian outlier among my friends. I believed I was special.

By the time I got to college, my lifestyle had become so habitual that I forgot why I wanted to abstain from animal products in the first place. After all that time, I still knew little about the beef industry and its connection to the dairy and leather industries, and nothing about the precarious state of our oceans as a result of overfishing, or the fate of unwanted male chicks unlucky enough to be born on egg farms. My freshman year, I fell in love for the first time, with an Italian-American boy who lived down the hall from me in my dorm. He was an enthusiastic and aggressive meat eater, and after many weeks of his prodding, I relented and ordered a salmon steak at the Macaroni Grill. Since then I have alternated between meat eating and strict, at times militant, veganism.

Currently, I've been vegan for over a year, having again made the change after finishing a novel about young lovers getting involved in veganarchist activism. But the passive, day-to-day choices of ethical veganism alone leave me feeling restless.

III.

During the E.L.F.-A.L.F. period, I moved into a new apartment and got a kitten, whom I named Roslyn. I loved her immediately and intensely. Being a young adult of the 21st century, I demonstrated this love with hundreds of pictures on Facebook. All of my friends knew Roslyn and adored her; she even had her own Facebook account after a while. So when my boyfriend, who was already vegan, asked me why I would eat some animals but not others — for instance, Roslyn — the question seemed ridiculous. But thinking about it, I couldn't give him a good answer.

Now Roslyn lives at my parents' house in Florida and I live in a tiny apartment in one of the largest urban spaces on the planet.

Related

More From Menagerie

Read previous contributions to this series.

A large part of the difficulty I've had sustaining what I consider to be an ethical lifestyle over the years has been the lack of direct contact I have with animals. Most of the animals I see are either moving about on screens, or already cold cuts — processed food being another kind of screen. Recently, I watched two videos of an orphaned rhino cuddling with its keeper. I commented on a photograph of a baby brown bear on the National Geographic Instagram. I did most of the research for my novel online, where images of suffering animals intermix with those of docile house cats and cows grazing on hillsides.

There's a documentary, which I'm afraid to watch, called "Earthlings." The two-and-a-half minute trailer contains so much real footage of graphic violence that I don't think I can handle two hours of it. Joaquin Phoenix narrates while a cow thrashes around on the floor of a slaughterhouse, bleeding out, and a deer is skinned alive but continues to live. A dog is thrown, struggling, into the back of a garbage truck. One racehorse trips and five more go stumbling over it. At the end of the trailer Phoenix says, "It takes nothing away from a human to be kind to an animal." Seeing this, I feel a number of emotions: pity, rage, fear, indignation. But I know they're synthetic. They don't touch the love from which springs true compassion.

IV.

Sometimes, walking to the subway, I'll stop to watch finches play on a patch of grass, or a squirrel flick its tail next to a bush. If I'm lucky, I'll see rats running along the tracks while I wait for my train. But aside from the occasional dog, I never interact with animals. And while I feel more strongly now than I ever have before that being vegan is the most ethical lifestyle choice I can make, I'm also more sensitive to the artifice inherent in my daily understanding of animal life.

My first time grocery shopping after going vegan last summer, I walked down the meat aisle past sausages, ground beef and chicken cutlets, aware that my rediscovered beliefs were, to a large extent, intellectual. It took an imaginary leap for me to recognize the blood pooling in the corner of some Saran Wrap as that which had once carried nourishment to the organs of another being, so I conjured up videos I'd seen of slaughterhouses, battery cages and nursing sows. I reminded myself of all I'd read recently, how disgusted I'd felt just days beforehand. Reaching the end of the aisle, I still felt disconnected. Then I saw the chicken feet.

They'd always been there next to the cow tongues but I'd never seen that they were so humanlike. They were bled white and plump. Their four digits bent innocently at the knuckles like children's. Skin was torn where it was handled too roughly, and snapped tendons showed from the ends of wrists beneath ragged skin where the feet had been chopped. Fingernails came to elegant points. I got close and stared. What had been theoretical just seconds before had suddenly become disturbingly, gloriously real to me.

V.

Growing up by the water in Florida, I spent a lot of time interacting with wildlife: stingrays, pelicans, mangroves, lizards, orange trees, hibiscus and any number of sea birds and tropical bugs. My husband and I flew down recently to visit my parents and I took him to an estuary where I used to spend my free time. We stood silently at the edge of a tide pool, and after some minutes, fiddler crabs crept from the mud, first one at a time, and then by the dozens. They scuttled around our feet making gentle waves, unaware that we watched from above.

It is one of my life's great regrets that I haven't done more to defend other species against human greed. Whether fatigue or complacency, finding excuses is easy. A lack of time and money is the first. Then comes the blame: I don't have money because capitalism doesn't work; this is how the system's designed; it doesn't allow you to resist. Then the defeat: We've already lost; the earth is doomed; I'm doing all I can day to day.

Deep down, I know that I'm not.

Recently, The Associated Press reported that the earth is standing at the precipice of a sixth mass extinction as a result of disappearing habitats. When I read things like this, my rage is ignited as it was nearly a decade ago. I wonder all over again: Who is injured when a logging station or a slaughterhouse burns? Who is injured when it doesn't? When we talk about animals, we are also talking about humans. But anger alone will get us nowhere, and violence will get us nowhere. As if grieving, we have to learn to endure, making conscious choices, every day, which help us to live.

Sarah Gerard is the author of "Things I Told My Mother," a chapbook, and the forthcoming novel "Binary Star." She works at BOMB magazine.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Room for Debate: Is 'Broken Windows' a Broken Policy for Police?

Eric Garner, 43, died after a police officer put him in a chokehold for resisting arrest on charges of selling loose cigarettes on Staten Island.

Many New Yorkers were enraged not just by his death, but also because it occurred as part of the New York Police Department's policy — based on the "broken windows" theory — to deter major crime by aggressively dealing with small offenses.

Critics say it leads to harassment of blacks and Hispanics and antagonizes residents of high-crime neighborhoods while doing nothing to fight serious crime.

Is the policy effective or counterproductive?

Read the Discussion »

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | Fixes: Child Care and the Overwhelmed Parent

Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.

Earlier this month, a mother in North Augusta, S.C., was arrested after authorities learned that she had dropped her 9-year-old daughter off at a nearby park while she worked her shift at a McDonald's restaurant. That news, along with a flurry of reports last week that she was fired from her job — later found to be erroneous — prompted public debate about the the difficulty of finding and affording child care.

One sympathetic woman, a stranger to the mother, even began a crowdfunding campaign on YouCaring.com called "Support Debra Harrell." To date, it has raised nearly $40,000, far exceeding its $10,000 goal.

The kindness of strangers is always welcome. But what working mothers really need are systematic ways to find and afford safe, local care options for their kids. While many parents scramble to find care in the summer months, especially for older children out of school, it's a year-round challenge for families with kids younger than preschool age. Twelve million infants (from birth to 4 years old) are in daily care with someone other than a primary parent, according to the Census Bureau.

Resources for choosing a child-care provider are antiquated. Only 27 states even post reports online on both regular monitoring and inspections of child-care centers, and only 24 do for home-based child-care. In California, according to a recent report by The Center for Investigative Reporting, parents had to actually go in person or call during business hours to request reports on one of the 48,000 state-licensed day care, preschool and after-school programs. Even in the heart of Silicon Valley, reports aren't available online.

The adults and environments that dominate a child's earliest years influence the rest of their lives.

Costs are high. Child Care Aware America, a national organization focused on quality childcare, reports that the annual cost of day care for an infant is more than the average cost of in-state tuition and fees at public colleges in 31 states. And according to the news site Vox, the problem is just getting worse; the cost of child care is growing at nearly twice the rate of prices economy-wide.

Quality of care is critical. We are learning more every day about how important the first three years are to brain development. Synapses essentially organize the brain by forming pathways that connect the parts of the brain governing everything we do. According to Zero to Three, a national advocacy group for families with infants, a healthy toddler may create two million synapses per second. The adults they interact with and the environments they're in on a regular basis hugely impact the quantity and quality of these connections — influencing the rest of their lives.

Given that the stakes are so high and the costs so steep, how does an already overwhelmed working parent find a decent, affordable child-care provider?

The Most Basic Safety

Parents in some places are provided with more satisfying answers than in others. South Carolina, where Harrell is fighting to keep her daughter, is ranked 45th in the country for quality child care by Child Care Aware America.

But other states are demonstrating that some simple steps can go a long way in helping parents connect with the resources they need. Take Indiana (rated 12th). Parents in the Hoosier state can start by checking out the official inspection records of any day care center online at the Family and Social Services Administration website. This helps moms and dads figure out fundamentals about the safety of a prospective childcare provider, in addition to more subtle information, like when and how food is served, how many providers are on site or whether pets are allowed on the premises.

But getting the complete reports online is only half the battle. Many parents don't have time to read them, and those who do can find them difficult to understand. Many are written in county code, not plain language.

Some child-care centers are reviewed on existing portals like Yelp, but there are drawbacks to trying to get good information there. Yelp doesn't include inspection reports along with its customer reviews, and as Melanie Brizzi of the Family and Social Services Administration Bureau of Child Care in Indiana explains, there's an economic incentive for centers to drum up good reviews. "Families have always relied on word of mouth. Yelp is the newest form of that, but parents have to remember that it is a commercial site," not one designed to best serve families.

In Indiana, parents don't just have access to the official inspections. They can also educate themselves by going to Paths to Quality, a website where regulated child-care providers can volunteer to be rated on a simple scale of 1 to 4. No bureaucratic language to wade through here. They've even produced a video explainer that helps parents understand the various issues they might consider when choosing day care.

So why is it that Indiana has managed to create such accessible resources for busy parents and other states, like South Carolina and California, are stuck in the dark ages?

Part of the answer is that Indiana was ahead of the legislative curve. A statute passed in 2000 required the local bureau to post inspection information online (California just passed a similar statute). By 2001, Indiana was complying.

Moving Beyond Compliance

But as the decade wore on, its ambition grew beyond mere compliance. By 2006, the state began training inspectors to record their findings in the field on small tablet computers. Not only did this save time for the inspectors, but there were fewer errors created by transferring data from paper to computer. Monitoring became easier with the custom-built system; noncompliance could be tracked automatically. Indiana worked with a tech company called the Consultants Consortium to build the web-based portal and train the inspectors. The transition was complete by 2007.

Related

More From Fixes

Read previous contributions to this series.

Once that system was running smoothly, it freed the bureau up to think about ways to make information on child care even more accessible for busy Indiana parents. The Paths to Quality website was operating by 2009. Since then, there has been a steady increase in parents using the site; last year 10,677 searched for child care using Indiana's official search engine.

Every state has a number of physical centers that parents can go to for references to quality child-care providers and other information on subsidies. They're known as Child Care Resource and Referral centers, or C.C.R.&R.'s.

But these centers vary greatly in their quality. And parents just don't use many of them.

Indiana, recognizing that many people don't have the time or desire to go to a physical center, created a centralized call service in 2012. Indiana's friendly operators gather relevant information (the family's home address, number of kids and their ages, how much parents can pay and what days they need help, their preferences regarding in home vs. stand-alone center vs. ministerial care, etc.) and then compile a customized list of good options for the caller which they can email or go over in real time on the phone. They can even read inspections with callers to be sure they understand the nature of violations.

These same operators also field any complaints, which further holds providers accountable between inspections, and helps worried parents find alternative care options as quickly as possible.

The call center, which fielded nearly 9,000 calls last year, is open during regular business hours, but has extended hours once a week and is also open Saturdays. Parents can leave a message and are guaranteed to get a call back within 24 hours. They can also email.

The Economic Case for Quality Care

To be sure, Indiana's population (7 million) is small compared with those of many other states (including California, which has 38 million residents), but the majority of fixes — inspectors armed with tablets in the field, the easier-to-understand ranking system, the centralized call center — wouldn't be difficult to scale.

The class implications are startling. Working-class parents are less likely to have maternity and/or paternity leave — special time to start nurturing those first synapses and smiles themselves; they also don't have as much flexibility during the workday to visit referral centers, tour day care centers or request inspection reports in person.

States like Indiana that have committed to helping parents find and afford quality care are making an investment in the future of their state, and the nation.

Ted Maple, the president and chief executive of the Day Nursery Association of Indianapolis, believes that making it easier for parents to find quality care isn't just right, but smart for states (especially those struggling to lower unemployment). In fact, the economic argument was pivotal in helping Indiana pass recent legislation that will help more kids — especially poor kids — thrive in safe, stimulating day care settings. Maple explains, "We had great bipartisan support for the bill, in large part, because business got behind it. Big employers argued that it's hard for them to retain great workers when they can't find or afford quality child care. There is a growing recognition in the business community that early childhood education has a long-term payoff."

The Indiana law, which goes into effect in May, also provides incentives to day care centers to improve their facilities and hire more workers through increased reimbursement rates for good inspections. That's good for cash-strapped caregivers, too.

While few studies exist on the link between improving parents' capacity to find quality child care and a thriving economy, related research on the bottom line benefits of early-childhood programs are plentiful. In 2007, for example, Ludwig of the University of Chicago and Deborah Phillips of Georgetown found that there was a $7 to $9 return on investment for every $1 invested in Head Start, a federal program that promotes the school readiness of children ages birth to 5 from low-income families.

There is some controversy surrounding studies like these, but most researchers agree that Head Start, and programs like it, have been shown to have lasting positive effects on children in areas such as future college attendance and fewer criminal offenses in young adulthood, among others.

Brizzi explains, "Too often we still see that the poorest quality room in a child-care center is the one that has the infants and toddlers. It's an afterthought — the babies just need to be fed and have their diapers changed. But there is a growing awareness, thanks to all of the great research coming out, about how important the infant stage really is.

Now we need to get that research out and make a focused investment that starts with empowering parents. We have a long way to go."

Updated, Friday, July 25, 2:48 p.m., to reflect Debra Harrell's employment status and the amount of money raised in support of her. |

Courtney E. Martin is the author of "Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists" and "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection is Harming Young Women." This column was written as a collaboration between the Solutions Journalism Network, which she co-founded, and Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit investigative newsroom based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Correction: July 25, 2014
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Debra Harrell was fired from her job at McDonald's after her arrest. That statement was based on several news reports at the time of the article's publication, which were found to be incorrect after McDonald's denied the charge and Ms. Harrell's lawyer agreed that the claim was based on a misunderstanding about her employment status.

A version of this article appears in print on 07/27/2014, on page SR12 of the National edition with the headline: Child Care for the Overwhelmed.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Room for Debate: Rethinking Wedding Traditions

In the midst of the busy wedding months, a recent Slate advice column deals with whether men should ask their future in-laws for permission to marry their daughters. In today's world, the custom seems antiquated.

What wedding traditions should be revived or discarded?

Read the Discussion »

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | Private Lives: I Was the Sick Passenger

Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.

I was the sick passenger on the No. 2 train, the one responsible for the line's delay. It was I who kept New Yorkers from their destinations, and prompted the notice that thanked them for a quality they're not known to have.

It was a recent Tuesday evening, at the tail end of rush hour. In spite of the announcement advising otherwise, I was leaning against the subway doors. In my left hand was an oversize umbrella and a handbag; on my right shoulder was a duffel bag stuffed with sneakers and athletic wear. I'd been planning to go to spin class, but had stayed late at the office preparing my boss for a trip.

I pulled out Susannah Cahalan's memoir about mental illness, "Brain on Fire," and picked up where I'd left off that morning, Chapter 27: "Brain Biopsy."

The next stop was Wall Street. More commuters got on than off. It was cramped, hot and stuffy in there. Susannah Cahalan was describing getting a 5-inch-diameter section of her head shaved. As we entered the tunnel that goes under the East River her father was holding back tears. The neurosurgeon prepped for the operation. Possible complications were described, inspiring in me a slight swoon. I felt that my armpits were sticky, and took a deep breath.

While we approached Borough Hall the doctor made an S-shaped incision with a scalpel. Skin was parted, tissue cut and holes drilled in the writer's skull.

Lightheaded, I scanned the train for an empty seat. In the middle of the car there was one.

By the time I get there it will be taken, I reasoned. Besides, I'm really fine.

I went back to the book; the author was in the recovery room now. The reunion with her parents heartened me but there was something about the words "head wrapped in white gauze."

I thought, we're going down.

Photo Credit Domitille Collardey

The lights in the train dimmed as I lumbered toward the vacant spot. A man took the seat, but he must have sensed I was about to land in his lap: As quickly as he sat down he shot up. Once I was seated, I looked down at my umbrella handle and determined it would be a nice place to rest my head. The next thing I knew I was slumped on my seatmate surrounded by strangers asking if I was O.K.

A lady fanned me and asked, "Are you hot?" I nodded.

"I'm a nurse," she continued, while another woman with long dreadlocks asked if I wanted her water.

I knew where I was and what had happened, and that in a moment I'd be just fine.

"Station stop is Nevins Street," I heard the conductor say, and then, "We're being held here at the station due to a sick passenger."

My God, he was talking about me!

"We thank you for your patience."

I knew I had to get out so the train could advance. I was inconveniencing hundreds of strangers. How many times had I cursed under my breath when trapped underground? I tried to get up but I couldn't. Another woman rubbed my back. She said, "There's no hurry, just take your time." I wondered if I'd woken up in the Midwest.

After a few minutes passed I gave standing another try; this time the nurse and the woman with the dreadlocks locked their arms in mine. They guided me toward the doors, while the third woman carried my bags. I was steered down the platform toward a bench, and within seconds two police officers appeared, followed by the conductor.

So this is what happens while we're all waiting to move!
The policewoman asked for my birth date while her partner wondered if he should call an ambulance. I told him it wasn't necessary; I'd just fainted, it had happened before. He assured me they'd just take my vitals. This sounded reasonable.

The ticket booth clerk checked in on me, and said my necklace was "fabulous!" I told her I'd bought it at Nordstrom Rack in Union Square.

"She's definitely better," the policeman said.

The clerk then asked me how much I'd paid for it, and when I answered, said, "You could have gotten the same thing at New York & Company for half the price!"

When the emergency medical workers arrived, the conductor got back on the train, and I urged the three women to do the same.
"There'll be another train right behind it," the nurse said.

She must not have lived in New York City for long.

By the time the next train arrived, my heart rate was back up and my strength was approaching normal. I thanked my three fellow passengers for their generosity, and reflected on how I'd misjudged the citizens of this city.

Considering all the good will, I figured, why not work this to my advantage? and asked one of the police officers for a ride home. She laughed and said, "No, we don't do that." Then she pointed to my open handbag and said I was a pickpocket's perfect target, adding, "You're lucky you didn't fall on the tracks. This is New York City; you can't walk around all unaware."

This was the treatment to which I was accustomed. I knew I was better now. So I gathered my things and walked up the subway stairs, then caught a cab deeper into Brooklyn, and safely returned home.

---

Anne McDermott is an executive assistant at a real estate development company and a writer and performer.

13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Op-Talk: When Struggling Families Spark Internet Rage

Photo Credit Brenda Ann Kenneally

Brenda Ann Kenneally is a documentary photographer who works in depressed urban environments, often photographing their residents repeatedly over a period of many years. "Upstate Girls," her most recent project, began in 2003 when Ms. Kenneally met a teenager named Kayla in Troy, N.Y. Kayla was fourteen and pregnant and asked Ms. Kenneally if she wanted to photograph her child's delivery.

Ms. Kenneally said yes. She then spent the next ten years taking pictures of Kayla, her children, her lovers, and the loose network of family that connected them. "If there is any art in the images that I have been making in Troy, New York over the past ten years it is that they have heart," Ms. Kenneally wrote in a grant application to fund "Upstate Girls." "The undeniable need for this heart forces us all into a shared emotional narrative and that is the place where I want my work to live."

Last week, Slate's Jordan G. Teicher featured nine of the photographs from "Upstate Girls" in a post initially titled "Life Below the Poverty Line, Troy, N.Y." In one, a child holds out a bottle to be filled with coffee; in another, an overweight boy lies shirtless on a bare mattress, the bedside table beside him stacked with Doritos, an empty soda bottle, and a pile of white bread. Several photos show Kayla and other teenage parents holding small children – a father and his infant son are pictured in a cramped and messy bedroom, and a mother cradles the newborn she'll soon give up for adoption. Kids amuse themselves with video games and knives and pretend to smoke the cigarettes their parents crave.

Ms. Kenneally's forceful images drew a lot of attention. More than eighteen thousand people shared the Slate article on Facebook and hundreds commented on Slate's Facebook page. Another 387 commented on the original post. Tweets criticized the subjects and the photographer.

The comments were harsh. Many expressed outrage that Kayla would smoke while holding her baby. (This photograph, singled out with especially virulent criticism, has since been taken down at Ms. Kenneally's request.) Others remarked that poor people couldn't afford to waste their money on cigarettes, that the houses pictured were filthy and the occupants slovenly, and that the food visible in some shots was unhealthy. Commenters wondered how poor families had money to buy their children video games. There were accusations about welfare checks and snide remarks about contraception.

Some accused Ms. Kenneally of exploiting her subjects. "Is the photographer implying that poor people are too stupid to make intelligent choices?" asked one commenter.

Others defended Ms. Kenneally and her subjects. "Have you no sense of anything but resentment and jealousy? Troy has created/allowed a culture of deprivation to fester. Troy is a part of the USA. Have a little charity in your thinking if not in your comments," one reader wrote. Other commenters pointed to the insidious power of addiction. Some were turned off by the judgmental comments: "If your takeaway from this is the smoking, you're part of the problem. Middle class white people never cease to amaze me with their monumental ignorance," read one comment.

Slate's editor-in-chief, Julia Turner, told Op-Talk that some of the harshest backlash took the publication by surprise: "Commenters had varied responses to the piece. Some felt, as our photo blog editors did, that the photographs offered a compelling portrait of life in straitened circumstances. Others posted ad hominem comments about some of Kenneally's subjects. That was something we didn't anticipate."

Ms. Kenneally told Op-Talk that she was devastated by the response. After the Slate article's publication, she said, she was soon fielding calls from Kayla and others. She was concerned for her subjects: young, vulnerable people who were reading comments on Facebook calling them "trash." She added that social media had changed these subjects' lives: "These guys live on Facebook like they used to live on their front porch."

Ms. Kenneally has long thought about how to protect those she photographs from judgment and derision. She calls herself a "digital folk artist," a kind of "hoarder" who collects historical material and ephemera, including letters sent to and from prison, police records, birth certificates and family snapshots. She invites each of her subjects to make a scrapbook and posts videos of them narrating their own lives. To provide context, she likes to present her photographs in triptychs that contrast today's Troy with historical images of the city, once prosperous thanks to strong iron and textile industries. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women worked in factories and were comparatively well off. By 2009, Troy's median per capita income hovered just above twenty thousand dollars a year.

Ms. Kenneally's work points to the trauma of that socioeconomic shift and what she describes as a new culture that has sprung up in its wake. Many of her subjects have grown up while their parents have been incarcerated. Her photographs show evidence of the country's obesity epidemic. The children she has photographed often have trouble cooperating at school. Some have experienced frequent suspensions, been diagnosed with behavioral problems and treated with antipsychotics and antidepressants. Often these children, like many others in Troy, end up in juvenile detention.

In its finished form, "Upstate Girls" will provide this context. Ms. Kenneally plans to exhibit the work at the North-Central Troy Historical Society, a facility she's working to open in a foreclosed house across the street from Kayla's home. A historical timeline will run along the walls. Ms. Kenneally will also publish five books of her photographs, each printed on newsprint so it is affordable. A digital database will accompany a video documentary by Ms. Kenneally and track the use of particular words – "case worker," "parole," "A.D.H.D." – to demonstrate the prevalence of certain vocabulary in that community.

Ms. Kenneally has shared her work on the Internet before – on the Times' Lens blog, on Time's Lightbox, in the Virginia Quarterly Review and as part of a multimedia poetry project for Studio360. (She has also exhibited the work at the Sanctuary for Independent Media, located in Troy.) The online publications drew conflicted comments – one Studio360 commenter wrote, "I'm deeply ambivalent about this video/poem. I love that it allows me to look, uninhibitedly, at people whose eye contact I avoid in real life. But I'm not sure that indulging myself in condescension and curiosity is particularly helpful" – but the response was by and large more thoughtful than what followed the Slate article. Some comments on the Lens blog expressed compassion for the "bleak lives" Ms. Kenneally's subjects were born into and suggested volunteering at after-school programs. (A commenter at Time, however, referred to the subjects as "human garbage.")

The problem with the photographs posted on Slate, Ms. Kenneally argued, was that they lacked context. Worst of all, according to her, was that the Slate headline emphasized the "P word" – "poverty." "When you put a photograph of a young girl doing something and then say the reason is poverty, viewers separate themselves," Ms. Kenneally said. She added that the word "poverty" introduces a moralizing element. "The whole purpose of the project is to find a new way to talk about these social issues," she explained. Without context, Ms. Kenneally said, viewers were cut off from the culture and circumstances that define her subjects' lives.

Ms. Kenneally contacted Mr. Teicher and Ms. Turner about her misgivings. Slate added some links to more information about the work and changed the headline. It now reads, "A New Way to Talk About Poverty in Troy, N.Y." Ms. Turner told Op-Talk, "When the work is portraiture, we strive to be particularly respectful of the relationship the photographer has cultivated with his or her subjects."

Ms. Kenneally said she regretted handing over so much control to Slate: "It was a mistake. Next time I would say which photos could be used and how." She liked Mr. Teicher's text and said it was the "sound-bite culture" of the Internet that triggered the backlash. She also expressed hope that the North-Central Troy Historical Society would encourage greater reflection. Most importantly, she said, it would weave Kayla and her community into the historical record: "I want it to be like, we're here, we exist."

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | Draft: What Writers Can Learn From ‘Good Night Moon’

Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

I gave birth to twins a little more than a year ago, and at the baby showers we received many books: colorful board books, big illustrated books, collections of Sandra Boynton and nursery rhymes and Dr. Seuss, but none multiple times except this one: a board book "Goodnight Moon," a flimsy "Goodnight Moon," a large lap book "Goodnight Moon," and an anthology by the book's author, Margaret Wise Brown. Of course, I thought. It's that one that says good night a lot. I figured I'd read it before, just a story of going around the room saying good night to stuff, and I thought it was popular as a gift because it's so appropriate for bedtime and everybody wants babies to sleep.

But, when I first sat down with the babies, on the bed, nestled into pillows, beginning a sleep routine as recommended by their doctor, I pulled out the big lap book and read it aloud, and by Page 2, it was clear to me that for whatever reason, I had never read this one before. The babies listened in their sleepy baby way, and as the pages turned, I felt a growing excitement — a literary excitement. Not what I expected from this moment. But I was struck and stunned, as I have been before, by a classic sneaking up on me and, in an instant, earning yet again another fan.

It also seemed to me to be an immediately useful writing tool.

"Goodnight Moon" does two things right away: It sets up a world and then it subverts its own rules even as it follows them. It works like a sonata of sorts, but, like a good version of the form, it does not follow a wholly predictable structure. Many children's books do, particularly for this age, as kids love repetition and the books supply it. They often end as we expect, with a circling back to the start, and a fun twist. This is satisfying but it can be forgettable. Kids — people — also love depth and surprise, and "Goodnight Moon" offers both. Here's what I think it does that is so radical and illuminating for writers of all kinds, poets and fiction writers and more.

First, Brown sets up her terms. We look around the room and learn about it and "meet" all the items in question. The language is direct and clear and the rhythm is just right. The telephone, which we never revisit, is aurally perfect. "In the great green room/ There was a telephone/ And a red balloon."

After we meet the old lady whispering "hush," there is a pause built into the page turn, and the movement begins officially. The title kicks into play. We begin with "Goodnight room" and the pacing slows: the words are fewer, or at least they seem fewer. The cello, I'd say, begins. But even though we are now revisiting the items we've met, we meet new things too, right away. We hadn't greeted the moon earlier, but here it is. Not only that, but Brown allows us to hear of two moons, the real and the virtual, and not to worry about any varied rhyming scheme. When I Googled "Goodnight Moon masterpiece," I came upon a blog post by a reader who was irritated by the moon/moon repetition I had loved. Because they are such different moons! But that post was a reminder of the gentle risk Brown takes there. After the moons, we go through the whole room and our love of repetition is satisfied and we can track the little mouse and see the lights dimming in the illustrations. The page turns are beautifully paced and quite slow.

What a surprise, then, to find that there is a blank page with "Goodnight nobody" out of nowhere, sharing a spread with "Goodnight mush." What a surprise, then, that the story does not end with the old lady whispering "hush" but goes out the window into the night.

Most picture books would close with that old lady — that's the balanced choice. But we see the stars and feel the air — we've been sure we're staying in but now we're floating out. Why? And then back in for the ending of "Goodnight noises everywhere." This, the last page? At first, I looked for another page — why end here? Isn't it a little abrupt? But (after a few more readings), isn't it also the way for us to close our eyes metaphorically with the bunny and be in that state right before slipping off to sleep, that magical drifting moment after floating out with the stars and the air, when we only hear noises and next is sleep? The story has moved so close to the bunny as to become an experiential mirror of his drift and fall. How much deeper and more elegant that is than the neat symmetry we might expect.

For writers, this is all such a useful reminder. Yes, move around in a structure. But also float out of that structure. "Goodnight nobody" is an author's inspired moment that is inexplicable and moving and creates an unknown that lingers. How wonderful that this oddly compassionate moment, where even nobody gets a good night, shows up in the picture book that is the most popular! There is no template, ever. When writing, how do we allow those moments of impulse, of surprise? How do we not censor that kind of leap? (I'd argue for following tangents — for not feeling bound to the topic at hand.) And when to end a story or poem or novel or essay? It's one of the most common questions at readings: "How do you know when it's done?"

How did Brown know? On some level, it had to have been a felt ending, a note she hit that must have seemed right and took confidence and daring to pull off. The reader has time to linger with that end and accept it — it's not the obvious closing note of the music, it's not the fully resolved major chord. But she trusted it. How something ends is so much about a writer training her own instinct and her own sense of that note.

The babies are 14 months old now and I've already read the book probably a hundred times — but these unexpected choices of hers are the ones that keep my interest. I think I have a whole lot of rounds of the book to go, but I feel sure I will never crack open the meaning of "Goodnight nobody," and moments like that make rereading a genuine joy.

---

Aimee Bender is the author, most recently, of the novel "The Color Master."

A version of this article appears in print on 07/20/2014, on page SR9 of the NewYork edition with the headline: What Writers Can Learn From 'Goodnight Moon'.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | Fixes: When Poverty Makes You Sick, a Lawyer Can Be the Cure

Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.

By early summer 2010, the temperature had already reached 100 degrees in Cincinnati. At Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, doctors were urging the families of children with asthma to use air-conditioning. One mother handed a piece of paper to her doctor: The child's room did have a window unit, and she was using it. But then the landlord responded — he apparently didn't want to pay the electric bills. Use that air-conditioner, the letter said, and you will be evicted.

Where you work, the air you breathe, the state of your housing, what you eat, your levels of stress and your vulnerability to crime, injury and discrimination all affect your health.

A concerned doctor might have tried to call the landlord to fight the notice. Or, she might have handed the letter over to a social worker. But Cincinnati Children's had something better — it had lawyers. In 2008, the hospital and the Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati set up a medical-legal partnership, the Cincinnati Child Health-Law Partnership or Child HeLP.

A week later, another family came in with the same letter. And the week after that.

"Our lawyers were getting the same problem referred over and over in a short period of time," said Elaine Fink, who is the co-leader of Child HeLP. "They looked at the map ­— they were all in the same neighborhood. They looked to see who owned the buildings. In this case we hit bingo ­— the same owner."

That was the Brooklyn-based NY Group, which held 18 buildings in Cincinnati and one in Dayton. Many tenants in those buildings had ended up at Child HeLP — to get help with mold, water damage, structural perils, rodents or bug infestations.

Child HeLP wrote to NY Group, including in its letters statements by physicians about the health impacts of its legal violations. It sued on behalf of one severely disabled boy with a tracheotomy whose health depended on air-conditioning. The repairs were done in a few weeks.

But the point was not just to help individual patients — it was to improve conditions in the buildings for all tenants. At the same time, NY Group was walking away from the buildings — Fannie Mae foreclosed on all 19 by the end of July. Legal Aid helped tenants to organize and have a voice in the foreclosure process — among other things, they wanted to make sure that the buildings remain subsidized housing.

Ultimately that pressure resulted in widespread repairs, and helped persuade Fannie Mae to sell the buildings to Community Builders, a Boston-based nonprofit that develops and operates good low-income housing (which is maintaining the subsidies). Reconstruction is about to start.

Being poor can make you sick. Where you work, the air you breathe, the state of your housing, what you eat, your levels of stress and your vulnerability to crime, injury and discrimination all affect your health. These social determinants of health lie outside the reach of doctors and nurses.

In the early 1990s, Barry Zuckerman, the chief of pediatrics at Boston City Hospital (now Boston Medical Center), decided he was tired of seeing kids cycling back into the hospital again and again — asthmatic kids who never got better because of the mold in their houses, infants with breathing problems because their apartments were unheated. He'd write letters to the landlord, who ignored them, said Megan Sandel, who was an intern there at the time. Then at a cocktail party, someone listening to his complaints asked Zuckerman: What does the law say?

Zuckerman thought it was an important question. In 1993, he established the Family Advocacy Program with three lawyers to prod landlords, secure government benefits families were entitled to and fight with Medicaid, insurance companies, schools and other bureaucracies.

(Zuckerman deserves his own wing in medicine's hall of innovation — he also co-founded Reach Out and Read, which supplies books and encourages doctors to prescribe them and family reading for kids. And he is co-founder of Health Leads, a program that trains college students to connect patients to food, heat and other basics of health.)

There were few medical-legal partnerships until about five or 10 years ago, but now 231 health care institutions have them, according to the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership. The largest is New York's LegalHealth, which works in about 20 New York hospitals and is expanding — it will soon have clinics in all 11 of the city's public hospitals.

Medical-legal partnerships are growing in part because of increasing attention to social determinants of health. Talking about inequality means talking about the vicious cycles that keep people poor; one of the most important is the intersection of poverty and health. "And sometimes a new asthma inhaler isn't going to solve the problem," said Martha Bergmark, executive director of Voices for Civil Justice, and until recently director of the Mississippi Center for Justice.

The vast majority of low-income Americans have unresolved legal problems: debt, immigration status, custody issues, child care, benefits, back pay, housing, a special education plan for a child — you name it. All of these affect stress levels, which is in itself a health issue, but many have a more direct connection to health.

Medicaid in New York State is now, in some cases, paying for supportive housing. (Medicaid has long bought housing in the form of nursing homes, of course.) This WNYC radio story describes one formerly homeless woman now in a Medicaid-paid apartment. "You could treat her epilepsy until the cows come home, but without an appropriate place to live she was going to be sick," said Bergmark.

Clinics that have medical-legal partnerships approach health differently than others. When doctors have no options for helping patients with the social determinants of health, they tend not to ask about them. With a medical-legal partnership, they do. At Cincinnati Children's, each patient's family is asked: Do you have housing problems? Problems getting your benefits? Are you depressed? Are you unsafe in your relationship? Would you like to speak to a lawyer or social worker about any of these things?

That process can start right away. "We have attorneys and paralegals on site in the primary care center five days a week," said Fink. "Many times we get a legal aid attorney to walk down the hall to talk to family while the child is waiting to get immunizations."

A legal letter can often get a response where a doctor's or social worker's letter does not. The lawyers also save doctors time. "Everyone works at the top of their profession instead of the physician figuring out why mom is going to be evicted tomorrow and what they can do about it," said Ellen Lawton, co-principal investigator at the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership.

Related

More From Fixes

Read previous contributions to this series.

The reverse is also true: adding doctors makes legal work easier. Lawton said that lawyers' arguments carry more weight when they include a medical opinion. "The health of the kids changes the advocacy conversation," she said. "It goes from 'this is the law and you have to comply' to a conversation that's about community well-being and health. And when you're able to use the clinical viewpoint rather than a legal framework, you're able to resolve the issue much more rapidly."

Most important, a medical-legal partnership goes beyond curing an individual. Child HeLP's actions in Cincinnati's sick buildings made life better for all the families there. "Don't wait for the kids to be sick," said Sandel, who is now the medical director of the national medical-legal partnership center. "Look for the pattern and find what's making kids sick in the first place. The power of the model is moving upstream, going from person to person to population level" — legal action as preventive medicine.

Like other forms of preventive care, medical-legal clinics are a bargain. One striking example: New York City's LegalHealth wrote formal legal demand letters to help adult asthma patients get their apartments cleared of rodents, bugs, mold, water and structural damage. The apartments were fixed. Patients improved, drastically, and there was a 90 percent drop in emergency room visits and hospital admissions. This was achieved by a one-shot intervention that cost an average of $225 per case.

But while society may save money, that's not necessarily true for hospitals — and it's hospitals that make the decisions. Fee-for-service medicine rewards hospitals for more admissions and emergency room usage, not less, and doesn't reimburse hospitals for preventive services such as legal aid. Nor can legal aid lawyers rely on funding from the federal Legal Services Corporation, which never recovered from the Reagan administration's cuts.

Increasingly, though, hospitals are establishing and paying for medical-legal partnerships, despite the lack of reimbursement. (New York City's Health and Hospitals Corporation is paying for part of the expansion of LegalHealth, with other major funding from the Robin Hood Foundation, an anti-poverty group.) One reason is the growing move toward value-based reimbursement instead of fee-for-service — for example, Medicare now rewards hospitals for having low rates of readmission and good scores on safety measures. Nonmedical staff members such as social workers — and lawyers — are becoming a better investment.

Kerry J. Rodabaugh, a gynecologic oncologist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, started a medical-legal partnership at an earlier job at the Roswell Cancer Center in Buffalo. She studied how often lawyers were able to get patients into insurance or benefit programs, which allows hospitals to be reimbursed for their care. She wrote a paper on the partnership's work and the savings.

At Nebraska, Rodabaugh established a medical-legal partnership in her department.

"In order to get funding for my program I've had to prove a financial benefit," she said. "I've been able to document at my current program a 700 percent return on investment since 2009. When I'm talking to administrators they get very excited." Now U.N.M.C. is expanding these clinics to every department and to its primary care clinics in places with significant poverty.

"So much of child health is the result of poor social and physical living conditions for kids — food on the table, shelter, quality education," said Robert S. Kahn, a pediatrician at Cincinnati Children's who is the medical co-leader of Child HeLP. "So much of what we do in pediatrics is driven by these broader well-being issues for the family. We do much better when we partner with groups that have that as a mission."

Join Fixes on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/nytimesfixes. To receive e-mail alerts for Fixes columns, sign up here.

Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book "The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism." She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of "Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World" and the World War II spy story e-book "D for Deception."

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Room for Debate: Holding Peacekeepers Responsible

A Dutch court took the unusual step of holding its government responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Bosnians whom Dutch soldiers in a United Nations peacekeeping force let Bosnian Serbs slaughter.

But does holding peacekeeping troops responsible for the murder of citizens in their care set an appropriately tough standard of conduct, or undermine the likelihood that nations would participate in such missions?

Read the Discussion »

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | Private Lives: The Mystery in the Machine

Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.

LOS ANGELES — During the six years I begged my husband to get me pregnant, I kept certain images locked away in a mental hope chest. The first was the moment of conception — one of those lazy Sunday afternoons, post-brunch and newspaper, pre-dinner and a compelling HBO lineup, the two of us resting atop rumpled sheets.

In another snapshot, we're in a delivery room, the kind with soft lighting and birth plans. My parents and brothers and sisters-in-law are out in the hallway and my husband is at my side, his hair tucked inside a blue surgical cap, about to meet our child.

But it was the moment between those two that I held dearest.

Three months into the pregnancy, a sonographer rubs gel on my swollen abdomen and rolls her transducer over it. My husband and I gaze at the black screen as the grainy image of a fetus emerges, its head nearly as large as its tiny sea horse body. And then, a thumping sound, echoing like a signal picked up from deep space. My husband looks from the screen to me, and I can see in his eyes that he finally understands what I have instinctively known for years — that all of our ambitions, world travels and spiritual practices never brought us this close to the mystery.

My longing for a baby didn't kick in until my husband and I married when I was 36. My faith in him combined with the stability of marriage helped me overcome my twin fears of motherhood — suffocation and failure. I knew he'd never much wanted kids, but I stubbornly kept hoping he'd come around, like so many other men I'd heard and read of who started out ambivalent and ended up utterly in love with their children.

He didn't come around. Instead of a sonogram there was a vasectomy, then an open marriage, and finally a divorce.

The grief of the empty womb is electric with fury, a live wire that could spark anytime. At the grocery store, at the post office, upon the first glimpse of a pregnant belly or stroller, a voice in my head roared, "Why am I being wasted?" Like an evil queen in a fable it scanned the offending woman and spat: "Her? Her and not me?" How had she convinced a man to work long hours and do without luxuries in return for the mundane, mammalian joys of wife and child?

I wanted to strangle and claw things. I'd run out to my car, roll up the windows and drive around the block screaming. That way, no one would hear and become alarmed. No one would know that my maternal instinct was neither gentle nor generous. It was fierce, irrational, entitled, and the fact that no helpless infant was coming to save me from my narcissism only magnified the rage. It took less than a minute to scream myself hoarse. Then I'd park the car, walk quietly into my postdivorce apartment and collapse in tears.

The upside of allowing yourself to grieve like a 2-year-old instead of writing in a journal or forming complex sentences with a therapist is that the grief tends to disperse more quickly. Within a year or two I was able to react to pregnant mothers and their offspring like a normal person again — with smiles and coos. I took my vestigial longing over to the local children's hospital and volunteered to play games with the sick kids. Watching the sorrow and barely disguised terror on their parents' faces softened my envy for good.

Then, last year, my heart started acting strangely. Each evening after dinner as I sat down to read or watch a movie, it would flutter fast and hard up into my throat like a hiccup, making me cough. This happened five or six times an hour until I fell asleep. My doctor said it was might be a mitral valve prolapse. She ran an EKG on which the technician noted "Borderline left atrial enlargement" and made a cardiologist appointment for me. I didn't want to Google that and try to decode what it meant. I forced myself to wait for the echocardiogram.

In the waiting room, a half-dozen septuagenarians, mostly men, some attached to portable oxygen tanks, read magazines while their wives filled out paperwork. A technician called my name and led me into a room marked "Echo," where a cushioned table stood next to the same kind of machine I'd seen in the movies.

"That looks like a sonogram machine," I said.

"It is," she said, smiling. "An echocardiogram is just a sonogram of your heart."

I climbed onto the table and lay on my left side. She affixed several electrodes to my chest, dimmed the lights, smeared a little gel onto my skin, and rolled the hand-held transducer alongside and underneath my left breast, instructing me when to inhale and when to hold my breath.

"Hold, hold, just a little longer," she urged as she zeroed in on a spot and hit a button to save the image. "Beautiful shot." That's what you want to hear when someone is photographing your heart: beautiful shot.

"You must be a swimmer," she said, eyes still on the screen. "You can hold your breath a long time."

"Yes," I said. I badly wanted to look up at the picture, but I couldn't bring myself to look that closely at my beating, bloody heart. I kept my eyes on my knees.

Then she turned the sound on.

There were clicks, lots of clicks, as if she had pried open a grandfather clock, and also a surge of liquid flowing wildly between pauses. Like water rushing over a falls in gusts.

My eyes widened. "Why is it so fast?" I asked.

"Those are your valves," she said. "They open and close several times with each heartbeat."

"And that liquid sound is the blood?"

"Yes, blood filling and leaving each ventricle."

She saw the tears gathering.

"I'm telling you," she said, putting her free hand on my arm, "I've been photographing the human heart for 20 years. It's made a believer out of me."

"It's amazing," I said. "I mean… what starts it? What keeps it beating?"

"That's the million-dollar question," she said. "But something had to create this." She snapped another image as my valves clicked open and shut like miraculous little dams.

"O.K., hon, you're all done." She turned off the volume and removed the electrodes. "You can get dressed, and your doctor will call you next week with the results."

It turned out that my heart was normal. Its reason for giving off extra beats would remain unknown to me, as would the grainy image of its chambers pulsing with a thirst both perpetual and fleeting.

But I do know one thing: I didn't need a baby to get me any closer to the mystery. We couldn't escape the mystery if we tried.

---

Robin Rinaldi is the author of the forthcoming memoir "The Wild Oats Project."

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More