Sometimes the books we need find us. This week I had two of those little miracles in my life as I found All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks in my to-read shelf and managed to convince my son to read The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo instead of another edition of the I Survived series. Those books have had their uses lately, injecting hope as we navigate what feel like dark times (and my son loves them), but in this week of all weeks I needed something that wasn’t about an earthquake, tsunami, or hurricane. I needed to know how I am going to survive the much longer (and sometimes insidiously quieter) descent of my country into fascism.

Love as Nurture

Child of the 1980s, I grew up with a very particular view of love. If you were worthy (which as a woman meant being both beautiful and not too powerful), you would be placed upon a pedestal and cared for and worshiped as an object of great value. You would also, of course, be looking for someone to worship on a pedestal of your making. Sometimes those objects of worship needed to be reminded how lucky they were that you worship them, so you brought them down a peg (I now know to call this abuse), but as long as everyone followed these rules it was fine.

“To truly love we must first learn to mix various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.” – bell hooks, All About Love

Fine and empty, unrealistic and inhumane. The first realization for me in All About Love was when hooks delineated the difference between love and cathexis (the “process of investment wherein a loved on becomes important to us”). Cathexis can look like love but it doesn’t preclude hurting or neglecting the object. She separates love from simply caring, insisting that love involves nurture and that “love and abuse cannot coexist.”

“When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive.” – bell hooks, All About Love

The most shocking part to me about this reflection was how ingrained my acceptance of abuse as part of love was. Sometimes small abuses (remember when we thought “negging” was funny?) and sometimes large. I’m still grappling with this realization, because I can see in it how often I have not acted with love, even in the relationships that matter most to me. I can see how rarely my country (the government and citizens) acts with love toward our neighbors and compatriots. More on this later.

Patriarchy Doesn’t Work

“When we are loving we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust.” – bell hooks, All About Love

It took me more years than I’ll admit to see the patriarchal underpinnings of our culture. It was what I was born into and I didn’t question it (and when I did question it, my concerns were dismissed). All About Love helped me see some of the damage this system has done to me personally and to our society as a whole. When hooks references Harriet Lerner, saying “women are encouraged by sexist socialization to pretend and manipulate, to lie as a way to please… constant pretense and lying alienate women from their true feelings… [leading to] depression and lack of self awareness,” I can see the underpinnings of the quiet desperation suffered by so many women I know, even the strongest. When hooks writes “Patriarchal masculinity requires of boys and men not only that they see themselves as more powerful and superior to women but that they do whatever it takes to maintain their controlling position,” I see the hollowness of the structure on which it’s all built and why they are so desperate to keep us from questioning it.

I also see how difficult it is to build healthy relationships with anyone who is not questioning these frameworks. How can we love each other, in the way of nurturing, if we can’t even be who we are? Culture is a very strong force, but it is not immutable. We make culture every day with the decisions we make. We choose what we subject ourselves to and what we question. We choose how we let people treat us. We choose how we treat others.

“Individuals committed to advancing patriarchy are producing most of the images we see, they have an investment in providing us with representations that reflect their values in the social institutions they wish to uphold.” – bell hooks, All About Love

Again, the time I grew up in was rife with patriarchal imagery. There were glimmers of other possibilities, but they were too often extinguished. One of the choices I’m making for myself (and my kid) is about what media we’re exposed to. We can’t avoid all of it, in fact I don’t think we should, but we can make concerted choices and have the kinds of conversations that let us understand what we are really seeing and reading. Which brings me to Edward Tulane.

Love is Work

“In patriarchal culture, men are especially inclined to love as something they should receive without expending effort.” – bell hooks, All About Love

I had no idea what to expect when I opened The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. I’d bought it because our (wild) backyard bunnies are one of the things that have sustained me through the pandemic. I did not know the book was about love. I did not know this was the exact right book to read with All About Love. Edward is a ceramic rabbit who is loved and doted on by a little girl. He receives this as his due until her grandmother tells them a story about someone who could not love and Edward is very quickly thereafter lost. Edward sees many kinds of love in his journey and eventually learns how privileged he was to have been loved and have had the opportunity to love at all. He grows and he changes, he suffers and he is redeemed.

I love my little boy deeply. Both his father and I are committed to nourishing his spirit until he becomes the wild free adult he will probably grow into. I am also committed to the work of undoing some of the programming he will get from our culture and this book was a part of that. Because I adore him and I dote on him but I also want him to grow into a person who knows the work of love—the energy put into seeing himself and the people around him for who they are and nurturing those he chooses to love. And to let them love and nurture him.

Hooks writes about “how little support men received when they chose to be disloyal to patriarchy” and I have seen how in generations before mine this knee-capped the men who may have wanted to change. I see more men in my generation trying to do things like be primary parents and treat women as equals and how hard our culture (including the people around us, intentionally or not) work against them. I see men still younger having some success with allyship and personal growth but I fear for how fragile that could be without a larger movement. So I’m trying to give my son the strength to be part of that next generation who maybe, I hope, can live in a world where equality across genders, races, orientations, ability, and anything else you can picture is normal. A world filled with love.

The Aftermath of the Dobbs Decision

Yesterday was not a good day in many ways. We knew the decision was coming, but I still felt disbelief and paralysis that my human rights were wiped away with one decision by an institution I’d been brought up to revere. This is abuse. This is not love. And I know this is not out of character for our country, but I want it to be.

“Changing our thinking so that we see ourselves as being like the one who does change rather than among [those] who refuse to change.” – bell hooks, All About Love

I do not have a lot of power in this world, but I can take responsibility for what I do have. Yesterday I made some choices. I sat with my feelings rather than trying to push them away. I reached out to a dear, loving friend for the community I needed. I invited someone I wanted to get to know better over to my home, again to build community. I spoke up when someone was treating me as less than equal (no matter how inadvertent the gesture). And I gave money, because I could.

I don’t know what happens next. I hope that this cannot stand. I see how far we’ve slipped toward fascism in the last decade. I see the people who have worked hard against it. I wish the Democratic Party made up more of that group. I see how much work there is yet to do, not to get back to where we were, but to get to where we could be if we choose to believe in the inherent value of others.

How I’m Moving Forward

“When we hear another person’s thoughts, beliefs, and feelings, it is more difficult to project on to them our perceptions of who they are.” – bell hooks, All About Love

I am trying to move forward in love.

I will continue to speak up for my rights and the rights of others. I will continue to listen to the stories of those others, including reading and rereading books about the radical power of love by bell hooks and Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

“While emotional needs are difficult, and often impossible to satisfy, material desires are easier to fulfill.” – bell hooks, All About Love

I will build community where I can. I will donate as much money directly to abortion funds as I can rather than spending it on useless items that do not actually salve my pain.

“The essence of true love is mutual recognition—two individuals seeing each other as they really are” – bell hooks, All About Love

I will try to know and love myself because I deserve it and so that I can love others better. And I will especially work to be a more loving parent and partner.

And you? How are you getting through? Are you ready to change the world through love?

Sometimes it’s hard to know what exactly made you who you are today, but one of the joys of motherhood for me is rediscovering the books that shaped me as I share them with my son. I first noticed this on re-reading Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and finding the beginnings of my socialist tendencies there. The few times my son has been interested in The Story of Ferdinand, I’ve remembered where I first felt the peaceful pull of sitting in the grass beneath a tree, sniffing the flowers. But nothing has smacked me as hard in the “OMG is that where I got that?” as The Velvet Room by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. And while this is partially because the book speaks to some tendencies I probably already had as a fourth grader, it’s also a deeply artful book, which I think might have cemented forever my worldview.

Looking for Home

Not a lot of nineteen-year-olds dream of owning a house, but when I moved to Seattle so many years ago, I knew I wanted a big enough house with a fireplace and a yard and that was where I would live and eventually raise a family. I was lucky enough to have the family resources (a down payment and a co-signer) to get started on that dream and this summer we finally paid the house off. Was that why I picked up The Velvet Room when suggesting books for my son? It might be, but not consciously. He’s in a spooky place and I remembered there was a mystery and talk of a ghost and I thought this might be my chance to share this book with him during our early morning hammock reads in the grass beneath our cherry tree.

Robin Williams wants a home more than anything. Her large family has been traveling for the last three years, picking up whatever field work they can. They’d once had a home, but the Depression and her dad’s health robbed them of that security and now they live in whatever workers’ housing is available (sometimes resorting to sleeping in the family car). When their car breaks down in front of Las Palmeras, an abandoned mansion on an apricot farm in California, she is smitten. Already in this first chapter, the die are cast.

When I read of their itinerance and how deeply Robin longed for a home where they could stay, I felt a deep kinship. We didn’t move a lot when I was a kid, just an early move a few blocks from an apartment to a house, one year abroad in elementary school and another in high school. Still, I’ve always longed deeply for the feeling of being settled, preferably someplace quiet where I felt like I could be myself. Maybe Snyder felt the same way, maybe fourth-grade me drank the values of this book in, but it was jarring how much I still relate to this book.

Worldbuilding as Art

The second thing that struck me while reading this book was how well Snyder helped us see the world through Robin’s eyes as she sets up the hierarchy of the farm, starting with the second and third chapters. The family is buoyed when her dad gets a job at the ranch and to learn the job comes with a house! They climb in the back of the foreman’s truck for a quick ride to their new home. And Robin keeps watching for that home as they pass first the large, modern home of the owner, peeking out from behind a hedge. It’s the tease of a real house Robin could dream of, but it’s too big, too fancy to be theirs, she daren’t hope. Then they pass a lawn and an immaculate stable. After the horses comes a white picket fence and “a neat little house sat securely on a patch of green lawn.” She knows it isn’t theirs either, but hope lingers. The road turns from gravel to deep dirt ruts and they keep driving to Palmeras Village— “It had been right then that Robin found out about despair” as she realized they were about to unload into one of the worn two-room shacks where the workers lived.

Snyder continues to use distance, architecture, and landscape as mechanisms to tease out Robin’s desires (and ours). Everything has meaning and history, from the large stone and adobe (yes, the mix is intentionally weird) mansion of Palmeras house to the little Irish cottage behind. As Robin navigates the idiosyncrasies of the place, we learn about the history of the family who has lived there for hundreds of years. We are also constantly reminded about the differences between what Robin has and what Robin wants as she traverses the distances between. Eventually Robin is given secret access to the sanctum santorum, a fully stocked library inside the otherwise abandoned Palmeras House where she can linger and read. It is here that Robin is truly at home, to the extent that she’s content even dusting the tables. Writing these words in my small office with custom-built (by my husband) floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a lifetime of tiny objects and pictures around me, I feel deeply Robin’s peace at having found a place where her desires are satisfied, even for a few hours at a time.

Introducing My Son to Inequality

I am very aware of how lucky I am to have this home I can now call mine. I am also deeply aware that the city I once dreamed of is now wildly unaffordable to most working families, and it’s something I want to talk to my son about so he doesn’t grow up with a narrow vision of the world. The Velvet Room has helped us have those talks and more.

Snyder uses personal relationships to illustrate the divides between classes on the farm almost as well as she uses architecture. The best example of this is Robin’s relationship with Gwen, the owner’s daughter. Gwen is a winning girl, the kind of blithe, darling creature people are attracted to and don’t know why. Gwen is also completely unable to see her own privilege. This makes for a fascinating push-pull between her and Robin, who likes Gwen but who is unable to forget the differences between them. Gwen’s mother lingers in the background with a tight smile to remind us that Robin is not imagining the gap, she is a picker’s child who is accepted only to the extent that she nudges Gwen toward taking her schoolwork and music studies more seriously.

Snyder’s use of Theresa, daughter of another worker, is less artful, and I’ll admit I cringed while sounding out the heavily accented Spanish. Snyder gets the sounds of the accent right, but the character is unfortunately never full enough to make her anything but a stereotype. We haven’t finished the book yet, but I think I recall the Caucasian/Hispanic divide being an issue in the resolution of the mystery, and while Theresa as an alternative to Gwen echoes some of that, she’s not a realized enough character to properly pull that weight.

I have been grateful for the way Snyder takes us into the apricot pitting shed. It’s been hard to explain to my son (who I probably over-indulge with every part of my heart) that Mommy has meetings he can’t always sit in on and that sometimes I need to work to pay for our home and his roomful of toys. Reading about the pitting shed and the fact that all the children who are able to help help, whether they are old enough for a work permit or not. And that the smallest children who cannot help are left to entertain themselves at their mothers’ feet for more than 12 hours a day. To be clear, I don’t want that for anyone, but I do know that it was like that for centuries and still is in many places. And while I do not expect him to take up my copy editing (and would, in fact, prefer he not read Slack over my shoulder), it is important that he see work and understand different ways of working and that what we have comes from something—even the apricots he picked out at the store this week.

When fourth-grade me set aside The Velvet Room for my someday kid to read, I had no idea the experience would be this rich. That I would learn so much from the book all over again and that it would give me tools for teaching my son. But I’m grateful. Are there childhood books that you’ve held onto (either physically or in your heart) that you’ve learned from as an adult? Please tell me everything.