Michael and I sat in the front row. He was wearing his by-then trademark red bandleader jacket with epaulets and gold rope loops at the shoulder, trim black slacks, white socks, black shoes, and yes, a glove. Whoopi was hilarious, and at one point singled me out for audience participation. She asked a few questions and pulled me onstage. I gamely played along, enjoying the attention.

Why Michael approached me in a room full of superstars after the show I will never know. Perhaps because I was the youngest in the room, and at 14 didn’t have a big name, a big career or a powerful company. I was a kid, easy, with few expectations. I was not old enough to demand, even silently, that he live up to anything. Perhaps he felt that with me he could be, in a sense, free.

I remember his body language. He moved slowly, like a very cool cat, hesitant, but smooth. And then, in the softest of voices, he asked how I was able to do the impromptu bit of comical business. He could never do something like that on the spot, he said. He’d be too nervous. I remember laughing and chiding him. You’d be great, Michael! I said. He shook his head and out crept a smile so open and vulnerable that I wanted to hug him, and probably would have, if he weren’t Michael Jackson.

But he was, and I had no way to reach across the boundary of celebrity that put us on opposite sides of an invisible fence. Michael was, as he described himself in a song years later, untouchable. I believe that is what killed him. A human being can only live so long without the touch of another and can only breathe manufactured air for so many minutes.

We are left with music, memories and the shame of our own narcissistic voyeurism. As it was for so many of us, Michael’s music was a running soundtrack for my life, a powerful influence that helped shape my identity. As a young girl, I kissed a boy furtively as Michael’s song, “Rock with You,” played on my cassette player. My first real boyfriend stood for hours in front of a full-length mirror in my bedroom practicing his Michael Jackson dance moves. In quieter moments, we lay on my bed listening to “She’s Out of My Life” on the record player, both of us close to tears and full of reverence for Michael’s heartfelt emotion.

Later, when I was old enough to go out dancing with my friends, we’d all scream when we heard the rumblings of his sultry dance groove, “Don’t Stop Till You get Enough” and head to the dance floor for some serious getting down.

After college, I wrote my first memoir about growing up biracial and drew sustenance from the video for his song, “Black or White,” in which Michael portrayed race as fluid; the models in the video morphed from African to Indian to Italian to Swedish to Mongolian and back again. And he told the world that love is what matters, not skin color.

But then the nose narrowed too much, and the ever-lightening skin grew hard to stomach. The lawsuits began to surface, one after another, and then the trial and the faces of the young boys with sorrowful tales of abuse. I sat transfixed before the television and trolled the Internet for sordid news. I watched, ridiculed, judged and tried to hold on to the unsullied image of the man I met. But the stage had been set. Michael’s life was already one giant Rorschach. I sat on the sidelines with my popcorn, projecting hope and desire, fantasy and fear onto his increasingly frail body, waiting for the next set.

I will not forget the moment I heard Michael Jackson was dead. I was driving on an island road, with rows of sugar cane on either side. The sun was bright and yellow and hot. I pulled over onto a patch of grass, in shock and disbelief. Michael Jackson is dead? I kept asking my husband over and over. Dead? I groped to put it in context, to read the moment, to see what it meant for him, but perhaps more important, what it meant for me. A part of me was dying, I decided. The part that hoped Michael could survive the tremendous burden he carried, that I carried. The part that held the memory of his precious innocence: my precious innocence.

That night I watched one of Michael’s breathtaking performances of the song “What About Us” on YouTube.  

In the beginning, Michael emerges from a giant earth, surrounded by children and proceeds to build the song to a feverish pitch. The lyrics ask all the right questions: “What about sunrise? What about rain? What about killing fields? Is there still time? Did you ever stop to notice, all the blood we’ve shed before? Did you ever stop to notice, this crying earth, this weeping shore?”

As the song soars toward the crescendo, Michael asks again and again, “What about us?” “What about us?” People in the audience scream and weep. At the end, spent, victorious and miraculous, he gathers the children, and they walk slowly back into the giant earth at the center of the stage.

Initially, I was speechless, overwhelmed by his mastery of his form and the power of his message. And then, without thinking, I turned from the computer and said out loud, “What about us? What about him?”

Because that’s the real story, isn’t it? It was always all about us. Who came with that level of passion and commitment on Michael’s behalf? Who offered their lives to him the way he offered his to us?

But even in the question, we glimpse the conundrum. We use his death, as we used his life, as a mirror. There is no room for Michael. It is still, tragically, all about us.

Perhaps that is Michael Jackson’s final song, his parting gift. We must have a bigger heart, a bigger vision.

It’s not all about us.

The post The Untouchable Michael Jackson appeared first on Jewcy.

Make no mistake, I wouldn’t have fourteen kids. But if I did, I wouldn’t deserve hyper-scrutiny, public ridicule, and a contant drone of judgment. Suleman wanted to have a lot of kids. Her reasons are complicated. Why is it anyone’s business? Women have had fourteen kids and more for centuries. Women have chosen selective reduction and "killed" their fertilized eggs since IVF became viable. 

It’s called the right to privacy. It’s called the relationship between a woman and her doctor. If her doctor broke the law, fine. But the world is on fire. The alleged 1.3 million dollars American taxpayers will have to fork over to support Suleman and her brood is nothing compared to the twenty billion dollars American CEOs have stolen from the TARP bailout in incomprehensible bonuses. 

But Nadya Suleman is the new, collagen injected version of the "Welfare Mom." She’s that single, lazy mom putting the squeeze on our shrinking wallets. She’s an educated, but unstable and irresponsible "gold-digger."The state should hold her accountable, but Madoff, who bankrupted humanitarian organizations all over the world and is at least tangentially responsible for at least one suicide, isn’t in jail.

Right.

I edited One Big Happy Family to support people who make nontraditional choices, whether to be a single mom or to give birth at home without a midwife. I edited it because traditional nuclear families end in divorce half the time, and often drive one or more members to Valium, infidelity, bankruptcy, or something far worse. Which is not to say nontraditional families are better than traditional families, but it is to say that all of us are trying to figure this family thing out, and people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. 

Unless we’re talking supporting all families with health insurance, on-site childcare, healthy food, and affordable and high quality education, we should recognize pathologized mothers like Suleman as the whipping women they are. They are targets used to reinforce the normative of the heterosexual, married, upwardly mobile, and let’s face it, usually white family that’s disappearing before our very eyes with the erosion of the middle-class and looming impossibility of the American dream.

Truth be told, Nadya Suleman is taking one for the team. As long as we think she’s crazy and irresponsible, we think we’re perfectly sane. 

The post Nadya Suleman: Taking One For the Team appeared first on Jewcy.

We both cracked up because, well, I like to tend to argue and my son’s father doesn’t. I’ve been trying to stop and it’s the hardest thing ever. Way harder than probability and statistics class in high school, and a quibillion times harder than the LSAT I took a few years months ago when I was thinking about going to law school. It’s so hard that I’ve often wondered if I have a neurological tic that turns even the simplest request into a passionate, two-hour debate.

In the beginning of our relationship, I explained it was cultural. It’s a Jewish thing, I told my mate-to-be. We have strong opinions about everything. You should see us at the dinner table, I said. No one agrees on anything–where we should sit, whether the lighting is too bright or too dim, if the food is overpriced or genius, if my sister should cut her hair. Our willingness to dig deep over trivial matters is a sign of commitment, I told him. It shows we care enough to engage at a deep level.

Arguing, I said. It’s how we love.

To which he replied, I’m not Jewish and I don’t like to argue because it raises my blood pressure and I want to have a calm, peaceful life. You can go out into the world and argue your a** off, but for God’s sake, when you come home, can’t we just get along?

Which, in my argumentative state of mind (tangentially related to Billy Joel’s New York Jewish state of mind, btw) sounded like: Jews are crazy, can’t you just be normal and not Jewish when you’re at home? Which made me mumble something about him being anti-Semitic, which was awful, semiotically inaccurate, and the furthest thing from the truth.

But I was arguing. Who said I had to be rational? Terrible logic, I know. A truly heinous lapse. I’m still apologizing.

But back to Jon Stewart and laughing together about the pop cultural confirmation of what I’ve been saying all along. No, I wasn’t bat mitzvahed. No I don’t speak Yiddish or Hebrew. But yes, yes, I argue. So sue me. 

Ironically, it was a great moment. A love moment. A moment of acceptance. A cross-cultural moment. A moment of peace. A, dare I say it, family moment.

The post The Family That Argues Together… appeared first on Jewcy.

Women make up more than half of the American workforce, and the number of stay at home fathers, or “househusbands,” is steadily rising. Americans travel more than almost any other population in the world, and are also more obese, infertile, and Internet savvy.

For these reasons and more, the face of America’s families is almost unrecognizable compared to thirty years ago. Today, a dad ushers a mom out the door (or onto the laptop) and then purees pesticide-free food to feed their half-Mexican child, who was conceived in a doctor’s office and carried by a surrogate—living in India. A mother leaves her daughter with friends to board a midnight bus to a high security prison eighty miles away, where she’ll spend forty-eight hours with her husband–in a trailer designed for conjugal visits. On the way, she creates a spreadsheet on her laptop for a multi-national human resource firm that wires her wages directly into her bank account–from a branch in Korea.

And as I write this, our nation appears to be coming to grips with our unhealthy relationship with oil. Researchers predict that within the next three decades, suburbia will be thrown into chaos as a result of inevitable shortages. McMansion living may morph into off-the-grid habitation for the masses; family rooms once filled with flat-screens and marble and glass furniture will be grow houses, not for drugs, but tomatoes, carrots, and spinach.

CHANGE is everywhere, my friends. It’s in our house and the White House. It’s pounding on our front door, demanding we adapt, or be left irretrievably behind. We’ve gone from what color is your parachute to how creative is your adaptation.

Well? 

Rebecca Walker, author of One Big Happy Family, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

The post Note to Self: Adapt appeared first on Jewcy.

It’s late and the littlest one in my house is sleeping in my bed with the bedside lamp on, and five inches from his face. What my son calls his "favorite artist" is on eternal repeat on the Bose iPod thingy, and I have the distinct feeling that if I have to hear Ayub Ogada sing Kothbiro one more time, I will lose my mind.

As I pull the covers down, I see that not only is my four year old sleeping in my bed, but his Diego underpants have not been replaced with Pull-Ups! And he’s sleeping with not one, but six of the little plastic people from his Automoblox cars under the pillow.

A discussion between my inner attachment parent and my inner pro-individuation parent begins. Should I put him in his own bed? Wake him up to put on a Pull-Up even though he probably won’t need it? Then I remember I have more important things to worry about, like whether my biological son is going to have a relationship with my non-biological son, even though they may not meet until they are both adults.  

Oy.

One day I realized I was living in a totally new kind of family, and I wasn’t alone. My baby’s father is fifteen years older than me, and I have a non-biological sixteen year old I raised with my ex-girlfriend. My best guy friend is married to a guy and they’ve adopted a daughter from China. Another close friend has a husband and a girlfriend. Which is why I decided to ask eighteen writers to write about all the wacky, genius, technologically sophisticated ways they make family. 

But today as I was thinking about the new book, I thought about all the pieces I didn’t include because they were just a little shy of normal on my dial. Like the piece about the American medical student who married a woman he met in the Amazon who still doesn’t speak English–fifteen years later. (He doesn’t speak her native tongue, either.) And the story about the mom who made every member of her extended family members vote on whether her newborn should be circumcized.

What’s the difference between a new, groovy family configuration and one that’s problematic? I mean, it’s pretty newfangled to have eight babies via IVF, and I absolutely think Bill, Nikki, Margene, and Barb should marry Anna on Big Love, but where do we draw the line? Should we draw one at all? 

As Carrie Bradshaw might ask: 

When is one big happy family just one big dysfunctional mess, and how do you know the difference?

Rebecca Walker, author of One Big Happy Family, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

The post Happy or dysfunctional? Says who? appeared first on Jewcy.

Half a century after Deutsche, Susie Orbach, Kim Chernin and others argued that young women’s expanding career opportunities can (albeit not always) arouse a mother’s envy. A daughter may hold herself back, terrified that, if she does surpass her mother, she will be forced to eat of those proverbial poisoned apples – in the form of maternal disapproval, distain, guilt. Or, she may hope to win approval by her success, only to find that success does not give her mother pleasure; instead, her mother responds with envy, which a daughter experiences as disapproval.

This is a hotly debated subject, amd many experts deny and reframe what looks like maternal envy as maternal concern. And yet I hear from so many women who have felt undermined by their mothers. And mothers who have struggled with their jealousy of their daughters.

My feeling is not enough light has been shed on the subject, and, like mental illness, the kind of wounding that occurs in many mother daughter relationships is even more devastating because daughters are considered ungrateful for voicing their feelings, and punished accordingly. Especially in the black community, when so many mothers have had to work so hard for so long (and are perceived as uncomprehending of the suffering of past generations), and the Jewish community when the idea of a mother being resentful of her daughter cuts so against the grain of the kvelling, over-enthusiastic mother.

In both cultures, daughters are expected to be obedient and enduring of any kind of psychological burden; the idea of expressing upset is  unthinkable. And yet, as Audre Lorde wrote, "Our silence will not protect us."

What about you? Have you experienced any of these kinds of maternal conflicts? Either as a mother yourself or as a daughter?

I’d like to talk about this, to open the doors. We all have something to gain.

The post Maternal Envy: Fact or Fiction appeared first on Jewcy.

What a great job Obama is doing (and how saddened I am by how many are so critical so soon), the auto industry bailout and why it’s not "cost-effective" for the big 3 to go green, the staggering number of people losing jobs, and the theme I’ve hit several times since the Olympics: China’s devastating invasion of parts of Africa.

But right now I want to have a moment about ADHD, Ritalin, and prevailing attitudes about mental health.

Today at the health food store I overheard a conversation between a Dad, the person ringing up his groceries, and a woman on line.

The dad said his daughter was diagnosed with ADHD, and Ritalin was working well. He said she’s been experiencing a lot of success in school and at home and "her turn-around" was "like a miracle." The checker gave an enthusiastic high-five. "Hey man, that’s so great."

Then the woman chimed in with anecdotal information about an Omega-3 supplement that "helped the son of a friend." She tried to remember the name of the supplement, and while reaching for the name, suggested Dad try it.

Dad suddenly looked ashamed and embarrassed. He said he had "read some studies" about the supplement and was hoping to "get some soon." He really wanted to get his daughter off the Ritalin, he said. Because although she was doing better, he "hated being duped by the drug companies," who probably "invented ADHD in the first place."

The woman nodded, and agreed. "It’s worth a shot," she said, offering no further information about her clinical credentials or the supplement she suggested Dad try on the daughter who responded to Ritalin as if it were "a miracle." "The overmedication of children in this country is a crime," she said. "Have you tried taking her off wheat and sugar?"

At which point I had to tune out or risk an intervention.

Listen, I agree big pharma is problematic. I agree all kinds of illnesses are "created" by drug marketers, a lot of kids are overmedicated, and the whole world should be focused on preventive care, and living holistically in organic environments.

But sometimes illness actually responds to Western medicine, and when it does, I for one am happy to have access to it, not just for bone marrow transplants and the shrinking of brain tumors, but for schizophrenia and bi-polar disease, clinical depression and Tourette’s.

I left the store wondering when we as a culture will decide once and for all that mental wellness, like any other kind of health, is worthy of pharmaceutical support. When mental illness, like cancer or lupus or HIV, will finally be deemed legitimate enough to warrant medication.

Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of. Like any other disease, it’s something to treat. Whether it’s with herbs, meds, beets, or yoga doesn’t matter. What matters is that people–regardless of ideology, religion or cultural taboos–get better, feel happier, and are more able to make healthy decisions for themselves and the people they love.

I originally posted a version of this on TheRoot.com, a site with a decidedly African-American take. I’m wondering if the stigma around mental illness in the black community is more intense than in the Jewishy community. I think we Jewishy ones tend to incorporate mental illness into our idea of culture. A little neurotic? That’s called being a Jewish mother. Depressed? Well bubbeleh, what’s not to be depressed about? Life is suffering, you know that.

Plagued by doubt, uncertainty, a constant sense of impending doom and annhiliation? Eh, well, what are you going to do? This is our lot. Even though it all started with Freud, there seems to be a fine line between belief in psychoanalysis, and embracing the need for it as a source of cultural pride.

But is this a coping mechanism left over from a more harrowing time? Looking at emasculated sons and anxiety ridden, hypervigilant mothers, I wonder, does our thinking on this help or hurt? Can we imagine a Jewishy identity not mired in neurotic pathos?

The post ADHD, The Check Out Line, and Me appeared first on Jewcy.

If you don’t know about Samantha Power, here is an excerpt from Esquire:

Power, a journalist and now a professor at Harvard, who won a Pulitzer prize for her 2003 book on America’s response to genocide, A Problem from Hell, and who helped kick-start the Save Darfur movement, has a vision that will help shape 21st-century American foreign policy. What Norman Podhoretz is to the neocon movement Power is to this as-yet-unnamed force. (Neo-internationalism? Moral interventionism? Machiavellian idealism?) She espouses talks–firm talks–with rogue states, a respect for international law, and a moral and pragmatic duty to intervene–with troops if necessary–in cases of genocide.

I’m happy she’s back for a number of reasons: she’s passionate about human dignity and has a complex and pragmatic view of how to secure it. In other words, she’s tough and smart. Heart and head. Has a plan. A view. And her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, is endlessly relevant, and gives her unique insight into seemingly intractable hostilities, like the one between Israel and Palestine.

Though she’s been lambasted by Zionist groups who say she wants to do everything from fund Islamic terrorists to invade Israel, her official position is that the US should engage in an immediate and intensified involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. In her view, the situation "has to be resolved first of all for the benefit of the parties involved, but also to prevent ‘cynical Arab leaders’ from exploiting the conflict as a tool for justifying their policies."

This seems to be a rational approach.

But mostly I feel good about Power’s return because Obama’s ability to bring her back in a leadership role in HRC’s realm says he feels free as POTUS to make controversial decisions and continue to mix up ideological perspectives in the hopes of reaching different conclusions. He appears to be using the power vested in him to follow his agenda of change, rather than kowtow to personal gripes, party lines, or general consensus.

Obama appears to believe the two women, though different in their approach, are stronger together than apart.

Do you agree?

The post The Power of Power appeared first on Jewcy.

What Michelle Obama is Giving Up.

It was a fascinating conversation, but five intense women talking about Michelle Obama for thirty-five minutes? We could have been there for hours. I left the studio thinking about all the things I wished there had been more time to say.

I wish the show had been called "What Michelle Obama is Gaining."

There was certainly more to say about the question of "power" vs "influence." It’s my view that Michelle has the opportunity to have a tremendous amount of power–political, personal, ideological, symbolic, financial, social, maternal, emotional, psychological– but Anna Perez opined Michelle will have influence, but because she can’t write legislation and doesn’t have a vote on key issues, she won’t have power. 

But there are different kinds of power. Laws change administration to administration, but transforming the consciousness of a generation is forever. Did Martin Luther King, Jr. have power or influence? Did Jackie Kennedy want more power and less influence? How about Eleanor Roosevelt? And what about our former First Lady, Hillary Clinton? She almost because POTUS in large part as a result of her "influence." What about the Nobel committee? Do they have power or influence? Freud and Jung? Moses?

I was taken aback by Anna Perez’s view, her privileging one realm, the political, over what could be called the personal or communal, a view that has disempowered women for centuries. And I was struck by how difficult it seemed for many of the women in the conversation to see Michelle as anything but a victim. Incredibly, they seemed to think she was more powerful as a hospital administrator than First Lady.

We denigrate Michelle by denigrating her choices. Projecting an idea of her as a deer in the headlights rather than a lioness on the plain reflects a crisis of the imagination, and speaks volumes about what we think is possible for a woman, or any human being, to negotiate.

People working to create a better world dismiss their accomplishment at their own peril. They resign themselves to a lifetime of disappointment.

The post The Michelle Obama Files appeared first on Jewcy.

Cross posted at my blog at The Root.

The post Michelle Obama and the End of Feminism As We Know It appeared first on Jewcy.