Artist in California

This artist living in California reached out to Aid Access in 2022 to make sure that her children had access to medical abortions if they ever needed them. She talks about her appreciation for her mother, her own abortion experience, and how grateful she is that she had access to one when she needed it.

“Being alive is not an unmixed blessing. Being a moral person in the world is hard. And when you create a person, you’re dumping that on them. They’re going to go through life just like you do. Trying to be a good person and sometimes feeling like the odds are stacked against them. And I didn’t ask them for permission to make them.”
— Artist in California

ANNOTATIONS

1. Birth Control Restrictions, Reproductive Justice - The narrator refers to a case in Amarillo, Texas in April 2023, when a district-level judge ruled that the FDA-approved abortion pill mifepristone was inappropriately approved in 2000. This has come a year after the overturning of the Supreme Court case Roe vs. Wade, which secured abortion as a federal right. Abortion at various stages has been restricted and even banned in many US states, and sometimes have included the extremely common medical abortion pill mifepristone. As a result of these bans, many other states fear that the FDA’s approval will be overturned on the federal level, restricting the drug nationally. Many states, such as New York and California, have responded by stockpiling mifepristone in hopes to provide their residents with the abortion pill option in case of a nationwide ban. The narrator reached out to Aid Access to utilize these birth control options for her children while they are still available.
2. Unprotected Sex, Contraceptives, STIs - The narrator refers to the different consequences of unprotected sex. Sexually transmitted infections (STI) are one consequence of unprotected sex and can affect people with different sexual preferences. In the 1980s and '90s a deadly STI called Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV/AIDS) was rapidly transmitted throughout the world, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Since there was little to no knowledge of how the virus was spread exactly through sexual intercourse, many people practiced safe sex with contraceptives and STI protection. The narrator mentions pregnancy, another consequence of unprotected intercourse, that can be prevented by similar methods as protection against STIs. She mentions the fact that heterosexual people are not the only group that can become pregnant, and so contraceptives, as well as birth control through medical abortion, are options for people of all sexual orientations. As research and education on these matters progress, so does their effectiveness to prevent STIs as well as pregnancy.
3. Condom Use, Unprotected Sex - From the narrator’s experience, she felt pressured by her male partner not to use protection during sex and felt invalidated when she asked for it to be used. Studies have shown that many women are pressured by their male partners to refuse the use of protection during sex. According to a study conducted in 2006, in unstable heterosexual relationships, people are more prone to feel pressured by their partners to not use protection, even with the threat of pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections. At a health clinic in Boston, participants were given a survey about their use of protection during heterosexual intercourse, and to fill out questionnaires about their demographics and personal information. The study showed that cisgender men who identify with traditional male gender roles are more likely to pressure their partner into not using protection. Studies show that these decisions to have unprotected sex has also led to a rise in sexually transmitted infections.
4. Women's Liberation Movement in the US - The overturning of Roe vs. Wade was not just a significant moment for women’s reproductive rights in the United States, but also for women’s rights in general, as it gave many women a new mentality to seek out more liberation and autonomy. Two years after the 1973 ruling of Roe vs. Wade, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was implemented to give women the right to take out credit cards and allow them to be financially independent. Similarly, before 1972, women needed to prove their legal marriage status in order to get prescribed birth control to deter unmarried sex. However, many young women would fake their marital status to have access to these contraceptives. In 1972, The Supreme Court case Eisenstadt vs Baird put to rest this issue, stating it was against Americans’ right to privacy that a couple must disclose if they are married to obtain birth control. This gave single women more sexual and social independence.
5. Structural Advantages, White Privilege - The narrator describes how she experienced advantages over other less-privileged minorities. This can be reflected in her education, job opportunities, and access to better healthcare such as abortion. Being racially white and coming from better means financially allowed the narrator to benefit from structural advantages. This is known as “white privilege” and is the result of structural racism within the United States, which favors white Americans over people of color. Another advantage the narrator acknowledges is having access to better healthcare such as contraceptives and abortion, if needed, as a result of living in a Democratic (or blue) state. The narrator states that she feels more protected as a result of these privileges as opposed to people who come from different racial, financial, or geographic backgrounds.
6. Reproductive Justice, Abortion Access - The American women’s liberation movement for more independence made immense strides for equality in comparison with the generation of the narrator’s mother. Before the 1960s, women had very few options for contraceptives. As abortion was also illegal at the federal level before 1973, women were not allowed to be sexually independent without some fear of an unwanted pregnancy. With the introduction of the birth control pill, Enovid, in 1960, informally known as “the Pill”, women had more bodily autonomy. This option, as well as greater access to abortion post-1973, drastically changed the social structures of society, as women were able to take on new roles socially and professionally. Contrasted to the narrator’s mother’s generation, where women were restricted to a few professions and were encouraged to maintain a strong emphasis on the roles of wife and motherhood, the innovation in abortion and contraception post-1973 allowed women more independence and opportunity in the professional field. The narrator feels strongly about maintaining access to these contraceptive/abortion options for people who are able to become pregnant, as it has crucial effects on social structures.
7. Anti-Abortion Movements - The narrator mentions Randall Terry, one of the main leaders of an anti-abortion group known as Operation Rescue. As the pro-abortion movement grew in the mid-20th century, so did the anti-abortion movement. In particular, Operation Rescue was rooted deeply in very traditional and conservative values, such as strong gendered and family roles derived from the Christian faith. After Roe vs. Wade, Operation Rescue attempted to deter women and couples from obtaining abortions by physically blocking the entrance to clinics. In other instances they would have protests outside of clinics with graphic images to deter patients from going through with their decision to have an abortion. Terry, as well as many of his followers, were arrested several times for preventing women from their right to abortion. Although Operation Rescue claimed to be a nonviolent group, many of their factions grew more aggressive in their approach resulting in 383 death threats, three kidnappings, eighteen attempted murders, and nine murders related to abortion providers. The anti-abortion, or pro-life movement as they are sometimes called, is still very active today but tends to use political means to restrict reproductive rights. In 2022, the pro-life movement was fundamental in overturning the federal right to abortion, further restricting and even banning the right to abortion in many states.
8. Birth Rates, Infant Mortality Rates - Birth rates, or the average amount of children a couple has, are vastly different across developed and developing nations. Studies have shown there is a direct correlation between the birth rate of a nation and the education level of young girls, as well as the access to contraceptives and birth control. Another key factor is infant mortality, which can affect birth rates overall, but also the mentality around having more children when there is a higher chance some might not survive long after birth. In the narrator’s interaction with Kenyan women, she describes the cultural differences between the United States, a nation of both relatively low infant mortality and birth rates, in comparison to a developing nation like Kenya, which has a high infant mortality rate and relatively higher birth rates.

Transcript: “She would tell a story about how she– the women would bring their kids and wait to be immunized so they’re doing nutrition and things like that, and they would be like, ‘How many children do you have?’ And she would say, ‘Three,’ and they would be like, ‘Oh, I'm so sorry, that’s so sad.’ And my mom would be like, ‘Oh no, it’s fine,’ and then they would be like, ‘Well, how many do you have still alive?’ And she would say three, and they would be [gasp] like, how could it be that you only had to go through childbirth three times and still get three living children? So, yeah, all of my kids have been vaccinated for everything. It’s hard in America because when you’re thinking about risks it’s like, ‘Well, on the one hand there is a small, but real to vaccines and on the other hand, what?’ Like, in America you haven’t seen the what– you haven’t seen the thing that’s being prevented by that small, but real risk. My mom saw that.”

Learn More: Firooz Esmaeilzadeh et al., “The Comparing of Infant Mortality Rate in Different World Health Organization Regions during 1990–2017,” Egyptian Pediatric Association Gazette 69, no. 1 (January 11, 2021).

Learn More [2]: Michael R. Haines, “The Relationship Between Infant and Child Mortality and Fertility: Some Historical and Contemporary Evidence for the United States,” in From Death to Birth : Mortality Decline and Reproductive Change (National Academies Press (US), 1998).

Learn More [3]: Kim Eckart, “How Birth Control, Girls’ Education Can Slow Population Growth,” UW News (blog), September 8, 2020.

9. Miscarriage Emotions - The narrator explains that there is a combination of emotions surrounding pregnancy, whether it ends in an abortion, miscarriage, or is carried out to full term. As all three have different outcomes, people who become pregnant might feel overwhelmed and have a hard time processing all of the emotions that come with each of these life-changing events. In the case of a miscarriage, there is a staggering lack of research conducted on the emotional toll this outcome has on pregnant people. According to a survey published by Obstetrics & Gynecology, miscarriages occur more often than the public believes (around 15 to 20% of all clinical pregnancies), and the trama around it is not usually publicized or researched.
10. Birth Control Methods - The narrator talks about different forms of birth control. Some examples are implants that are implanted in the bicep and secrete hormonal contraception, Plan B, which is oral contraception, and intrauterine devices (IUD), which are implants inserted vaginally to prevent fertilization. These are all very discrete forms of birth control that are available for sexually mature people. All these FDA-approved birth control methods, along with abortion, are under threat in the United States of being banned. This has come after the Supreme Court overturned the case Roe vs. Wade, which secured abortion as a federal right. In some states where abortion is banned, discussions of restricting contraceptives are also in state political conversation. This includes the use of IUDs and plan B, both widely used contraceptives.

TRANSCRIPT

Interview conducted by Dan Swern

Interview Conducted Remotely

June 2, 2023

Transcription by Allison Baldwin

Annotations by Grace Romano

0:00

[Redacted], thank you so much for doing this, I am just going to go and load the video. Today is Friday, June 2. It is 12:09 pm Eastern Time. My name is Dan Swern and I am conducting this interview virtually. I am here with–

Me. [Redacted]

[Redacted], whenever you’re ready, please feel free to start from the beginning.

Okay. Uh, so yeah. My full first name is [Redacted]. I changed it when I was 23 from the name my parents gave me, which was Jacqueline, spelled in the full French way. If you look on the Social Security Administration baby names website, the majority of Jaqueline’s that were ever born in America were born the year I was born. Because it’s 1964, the year after the Kennedy assassination and it’s spelled in the French way like Jacqueline Kennedy, I, yeah, so that’s that. I changed it to [Redacted] because I never had liked it. I didn’t like Jackie and I didn’t like Jack. When I was little we lived in Kenya, and in England Jackie is a boy’s name. And I cared about that. When we got back it was always like Jack Lalanne, that kind of famous exercise guru guy. And I just never liked it. I saw my sister changed her name. But you get one chance. When you change it the first time, everyone tries to take it seriously. When you change it, your mind, and try to change it again, no one ever pretends to take it seriously, so I sat on it for a really long time.

What I liked about [Redacted], which is funny because it’s compared to what I didn’t like about Jackie when I was growing up was that it is gender neutral. Nobody knows if they’re going to get a girl [Redacted] or a boy [Redacted] until I show up and I like that. And I like that [Redacted] sounds like a name. If you didn’t know it was a herb, it sounds like a name. So, um, and the other thing I liked about it was if you see it written down, you can pronounce it. And if you hear it said, you can spell it. And that was never true about Jaqueline so that’s that. But I go by [Redacted].

I reached out to Aid Access last year in advance of the case in Amarillo that was going to take Mifepristone off the market. I’m not– I’m done with having babies, I’m post-menopausal, but I have two kids, and either one of them is capable of getting pregnant, and they, um, neither one of them I think is going to joyfully have sex with guys, so I don’t think pregnancy worries and avoiding pregnancy is going to be a fact for them the way it was for me. But I was born in ‘64 so I was 9 when Roe v. Wade passed. My family growing up was kind of political but that was completely off my radar. That wasn’t something that we talked about. That wasn’t a thing they covered. So when I– when I started having the kind of sex where you could get pregnant, I was 15, um, what did I use? We used condoms. We used luck. When I was 16, I was in a fight with my mom and I said very bitterly, “And I’m not a virgin anymore either!” That was the thing that I could think of that would– not hurt her, but clarify that I was a person who had a life that she didn’t necessarily have access to. That she didn’t necessarily know about. It was like, “You don’t control me. I’m a person now.” And to her full credit, she immediately took me to the OBGYN and said, “My daughter is sexually active. Let’s make sure that she’s protected and safe.” It felt a little bit like punishment. Like, I had revealed this thing to my mom and in exchange I got a pelvic exam, but I have to say, I am so grateful to my mom for putting the emotional stuff on one side, and putting the physiological stuff, how to do, “I protect my daughter” first.

[Annotation 1]

5:00

Like, the make sure she doesn’t curtail her choices first and we’ll sort out the between her and me second. And let’s see, I didn’t always. So I got a prescription for the pill. I didn’t always use it. When I went to college, I got a diaphragm. That’s a nasty, nasty form of birth control. So goopy. And then, when I was in college, of course, HIV was a thing that people knew about for the first time and nobody was exactly sure how you would have sex without contracting it so everybody was being super safe. And it was, I had a good twenty years of having sex without getting pregnant before getting pregnant by accident so, yeah, and my kids are at that age now and not all sex is consensual. So that fact that they’re not interested in having sex with penis-having people doesn’t necessarily put them out of harm’s way, and my older kid is trans, and in their world a girl could totally involve having a penis. So, I partly ordered the pills to protect them the way my mom protected me. But I also did it to have a conversation with them the way my mom didn’t necessarily have a conversation with me. Like I said, Roe v. Wade passed when I was 9 and I was having sex six years later, and I didn’t know that my world had changed in this opening up, possibility way. It wasn’t– I just took for granted that if I got pregnant there was something I could do to not have the baby.

[Annotation 2]

So, that’s how I am here now, doing this oral history, because, having ordered the pills on the site, and then I got an email saying would I participate, and here I am. What I want to say about the actual abortion that I had, just to get that story kind of said and done, because I think it’s part of the bigger picture. Yeah, I was dating this guy very briefly and he was a coercive control person. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a form of partner abuse that’s not necessarily physical but where one person kind of gradually takes over the other person’s life and kind of controls them. And I would have thought– I would have thought that I would have been too smart or too strong, too independent to be susceptible to something like that. And, um, boy it was really scary because no one is immune to that. If you’re going into dating assuming good faith, and then the other person is actually more interested, not so much in who you are but in, like, kind of how to own that.

Like people say, pick your battles, don’t sweat the small stuff, don’t get caught up in the details, and that works when you’re in a relationship with someone who is acting in good faith, but if you’re in a relationship with someone whose agenda is kind of to take over your life a little bit, the fact that you give way on the little stuff, it becomes militarized to– it just becomes the ramp for getting you to give way on big things.

10:10

And just, little by little, it’s always easier to have the other person have their way. It’s just always friction, or pissiness, or passive-aggressiveness, or pouting, yeah, like everything is a loyalty test. And it really works. It was, in the aftermath of this four-month relationship, just, if he had been more competent, if he had more self-discipline, if could have rolled out the taking over my life more gradually, it would have worked. You know, I was saved, not by my smarts or my independence, but by his inability to slow down. The moving in with me, really freaky. Anyway, so part of that was condom use, and it was just like, “Oh, you’re killing the moment.” “It’s not even worth it now that I don’t want to anymore.” In my defense, I had just had a visit with an OBGYN where they had said that if I wanted to get pregnant it would probably be hard. So, I thought I had a margin of error that was bigger than the margin of error I really had.

Boy, I had never, not for a second, since 1999, that’s when it was, I was 35, um, I’m grateful every minute of every day that that was a choice I had. And at the time, it was like, “I can’t be pregnant with this guy. I can’t. I can’t.” Um, my parents got divorced when I was in high school. They met, uh, they married when my mom was 20. I don’t know how old she was when they met. My dad’s family was very educated. A lefty, Jewish, immigrant family. Intellectual, verbal, lots of arguing and debating and stuff. Big on education. My mom’s family was super Christian, like, kind of crazy Christian. I’ve got, oh my god, if people on my mom’s side of the family knew I was doing this, it would be freaky for them.

[Annotation 3]

But, um, ha, I can’t even imagine, but, um, they, um, my mom kind of got married to get away from her dad, yeah, and so, uh, I kind of lost my train of thought there, but she, um, she divorced my dad, she wanted to– I remember I was– she knew after three years of marriage that she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with this guy, but it took another fifteen years to kind of get it going. By the time she had figured it out, I had already been born and she was pregnant with my brother. And she had my sister five years after me, so by the time she was 27 she had three kids and that was that.

So it took a really long time for her to really believe that she could have a different life. Having grown up under the thumb of her dad. My dad was not as bad as her dad. So that was– she had kind of improved her situation, and I think it wasn’t until the ‘70s, and the women's movement, and women all around looking around and kind of going, “Why am I married to this person?” Like I remember, it wasn’t until kind of around Roe v. Wade that a woman could get a credit card in her own name. And have a credit rating that was separate from her husband. It wasn’t until I think ‘69 or so that an unmarried woman could legally get birth control. Right? So, things were really changing. It wasn’t just inside my mom’s heart. There was a structure that was happening nationally that made it more possible for a woman to think about supporting a family voluntarily in that way.

[Annotation 4]

15:05

 And then also we were older, so she didn’t need to do the childcare. Anyway, what I knew from that was, if you have kids with somebody, they’re going to be in your life. I'm 58, so I would have been 54, so yeah, my parents were divorced for almost as twice as long as they were married. At least in terms of my life. But they still had to see each other at baby showers and graduations and all that stuff, and it was like, “I can’t have this man in my life for the rest of my life, like, four months with this guy and I’ve almost lost myself. I can’t, I can’t do that.” What I know now is, now that I am a parent, now that I’ve been a parent, I’ve got a 17 year old and an almost 19 year old, oh, parenting is so hard. And doing it right is so important.

I have a long career as an artist that kind of fell away when I became a mom, and it wasn’t just time and energy, although that was a lot of it. I remember at one point I had a two-year-old and a six-month-old, and I was sitting in tears because I realized that every hour of every day for six months out into the future was already pre-assigned to either sleep, work, or childcare, like that was it. That was my life, and, um, and you know, I had chosen it and so I loved it. I was living my values, right? In that these kids didn’t ask to be born, so I owe them in a way that I don’t owe anybody else in the world. Right? Being alive is not an unmixed blessing. Being a moral person in the world is hard. And when you create a person you’re dumping that on them. They’re going to go through life just like you do. Trying to be a good person and sometimes feeling like the odds are stacked against them. And I didn’t ask them for permission to make them. I had them for my benefit, not for theirs. And so, it was really really hard, but I feel like being a good parent, the world just can’t take anymore people who got bad parenting. They’re so destructive.

And being a good parent is so, for me, so there’s the time and the money and the energy but it started using up. Like, being a parent for me came out of the same place as being an artist, um, you’re committed in advance to creating a thing that you can’t control, that you can’t predict, and you– I don’t like money words, and invest is drawn from finance, but you have to commit huge amounts of yourself to a project, a person that doesn’t exist yet. With no guarantee that it’s going to turn out well and, inevitably, you’re going to get your heart broken. Because the end goal is for them not to need you, and to not be a little mini me, and to disagree with you about things. And so– and a– my art practice really took a nosedive, and I think it was because I had been doing parenting out of that place that I had been doing being an artist. And it’s been challenging in all the good ways, right, challenging in the way that being an artist is a good way. A good way to be challenged. And I’m connected to the world in a way I didn’t used to be because it’s almost like I made my own hostages.

20:00

I have to care about the world now, and I didn’t have to before. You know, I’m 58, I’m kind of in this weird little job. And it used to be, as long as things hold together for my lifetime, it’s all good. Now, I have to care generations out. I’m part of my community in a way I didn’t use to be. I volunteer for things. I have had to deal with my own shit, like, the tendency to self-pity or being super self-righteous and judgmental. Like, I can’t serve this project of parenting if I’m being driven by my own demons, you know? And I think about how impossible any of this would have been if that 1999 pregnancy had been the one that made me into a parent. God, it’s just, it’s been however long, it’s been twenty-four years, and it still moves me to think about the contrast between what didn’t happen and what did happen. What could have happened in the absence of an abortion and what could happen because of that choice. So, so amazing. So, that’s that part of that, and I can stop talking about it now, but that’s not because it’s too painful to talk about but because it’s– ultimately, everybody has their own story. And it’s what– but it’s what made me, it’s what brought me to ordering the pills for my kids.

That they may not need, and talking to them about the fact that I had done so and why. Because that’s really important to me. Um, my kids are at the age now where they don’t need me in the same way. And I’m looking at what comes next and feeling that, the small bubblings of, “Oh, I have enough extra me now, to maybe think about art again.” And that’s really interesting.

I’m taking drumming lessons. Like rock and roll drumming. Very, very self-conscious. But as of this week I can play the Pixie song “Here comes your Man” at 95 percent speed. And I only mess up at this one part where you have to play 16th notes on the snare drum for four bars. You know, so I’m a person who likes a challenge, but that too is a part of myself that I wouldn’t have experienced if I would have had to become a parent back in 1999. Yeah, there’s all this stuff that we had talked about last month, all these details of my life, but I can certainly say again I don’t know, for me today, the thing that-

I’m really struggling to feel any hope right now. You know, my little story just seems so small. And I’m in California. So it’s a blue state.

25:00

You know, I was telling my partner. We’re not married. We’ve known each other since we were 19. This is our third. This is [Redacted] 3.0. We met in college and hooked up, but we were both too immature to make that into anything other than casual sex and miscommunications and then, um, but we remained friends, and in the ‘90s we tried again and very similar result. And then in the early 2000s we had each arrived at a certain amount of maturity that we could actually embody this connection into a relationship. And, uh, I told him I was doing this interview, this project, and he got a little concerned and, uh, and wanted me to be certain that I thought about what the possible downsides could be. And I just feel like I am the most protected category of women in America. I am White, I am able-bodied, I’m a native speaker, I’m a citizen, I’m college-educated. I’m post-menopausal, so I can’t get knocked up. I’m in a blue state. I have family that will support me. Like, this seems like such a tiny, tiny thing compared to what’s happening nationally. And if I don’t– if I don’t do this little thing, like what is privilege for if I just, like, I don’t know.

[Annotation 5]

You’re catching me at a pretty intense time. I’ve had a lot going on in my personal life. My stepdad– my mom and my stepdad have been together for more than forty years and he was in the ICU all last week. He had what’s called an abdominal aortic aneurysm, which you basically don’t survive. And he is surviving. He is– he dodged the bullet. He’s 91. But yeah, he has a “do not resuscitate” and the medical team said that he was, it was hour by hour and there were nights when he wasn’t supposed to survive until morning. And we agreed that there would be a member of the family there with him at all times, so that if he died there would be somebody who loved him who was there with him. So, it’s been a really intense week and so my emotions are closer to the surface than they would ordinarily be, and I’m feeling how fragile life is and how much family matters, you know?

My stepdad has three kids from his first marriage and my mom has us three siblings. I have a younger brother and a younger sister. And we all pulled together super, super well, but it’s been really crazy, and so that’s just what’s going on with me. When I think about what’s happening right now with abortion access across the country, and how– how the world, you know these rights are so new. The idea that my little life, for ‘64 to now, could be this anomalous period in American history where women were dismantling some of the structures that made my mom’s childhood, you know, when she grew up you were going to be a wife and a mom.

[Annotation 6]

30:00

That was it. There weren’t options. What is the value of those choices if you didn’t choose them? If they’re imposed on you, right? You know, I mean, no fault divorce. That’s a thing that happened when I was in elementary school. When I was in school, in college, in the 80s, Operation Rescue was a big deal. And the leader was Randall Terry, and he was talking very openly about, first, we are going to roll back abortion, and then we’re going to get rid of birth control. Because there are all of these changes in America that are wrong, in his words wrong, that women are given a place in the world that is equal to the place of men, and women should be below men. And that’s our vision for America, and step one is to roll back abortion, and step two is to roll back birth control. Because as women, if we can take those away from women, we can put them back down where they belong. He was very explicit about it. And what I see happening right now is exactly what he wanted, just not explicit. It’s all in this other rhetoric, but the idea that my kids who were both born in female bodies that they could live in the America that Randall Terry wanted is so terrifying to me. And the idea that the evangelical side of my family found out that not only did I have an abortion, but that I am advocating for other women to be able to have that choice too, I just can’t care in the bigger picture. And I feel so small, like the thing that makes me safe here in California makes me irrelevant. I give as much money as I can. To abortion funds and stuff. But I don’t know if I can, I don’t know what to do.

[Annotation 7]

[Editor’s Note: Randall Terry is an anti-abortion activist and the leader of the Evangelical anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue, who has called for a nation-wide ban of abortion and the restriction of contraceptives. A key part of his campaign has been the support of the criminalization of abortion, saying it should have the same legal consequences as predetermined murder in the first degree.]

So, when I’m looking at these papers, with all of these details about my life, I think the point of what’s happening now with abortion in America is to make all of this irrelevant and all of this, to make all of this for every woman irrelevant. So, I’m just not me because it’s not me anymore. I’m just a body, just an incubator, just a thing. I guess that’s why, today, I’m just not that interested in talking about myself.

You know, it’s funny, because I have these kids I have to care. Because I was able to have an abortion in 1999, I have these kids. Because of not having to carry through a pregnancy, that’s the reason I have these kids, the reason I have to push. I can’t just throw up my hands and go, “Oh well. Not my pig, not my farm.” Yeah. That’s all I have to say for now. If you want to prompt me with any points or anything. If there’s something you need more from the notes from last time and whatever I’ve said today, feel free to say so and I’ll go wherever you need me to go.

[Redacted], I actually want to honor the way you’re feeling for right now, today, and I think it might make sense for us to–

35:23

[End of Recording One]

[Beginning of Recording Two]

0:00

Do you need to say your name again or are we just starting right up.

We just go right on.

All right. Going right on. Okay, so I’ve taken a break and now I am going to try and stay more on the topic of who I am and my story and how I got to where I am. So, I am the oldest of three, and you know how my parents met because I already said. My brother lives on the east coast. My sister is here. My sister, um, my brother and I were really close growing up, um, we’re only eighteen months apart, so very similar to the age spacing of my two kids. And I loved that because you never knew who was going to be, like, at any given age, like, sometimes I was– sometimes he was stronger and sometimes I was stronger, sometimes I was taller and sometimes he was taller. It kind of kept us from getting locked into older/younger or into boy/girl, um, so we were super close, and also I knew that boys can be tender and sensitive and smart not just, you know, the image in the larger culture of these kind of brats.

My sister is five years younger, and we were not close growing up, you know, we were– that age gap was– it was hard for parents to find something for the kids to do where they were five years apart, where either the younger one isn’t just in over their head or the older one isn’t really bored. And I was a “non-fitting-in” kid, kind of. My parents– my dad joined The Peace Corps when I was, well I don’t know when he signed up for it, but when I was in first grade we went to Kenya and lived in [Redacted] for two years, and I didn’t do well being taken out of my school in California and started in a school in Kenya. My parents were very idealistic. And they were like, “Our children will go to the same school that Kenyan children go to,” you know where the school didn’t teach you in English, not even in Swahili, which was the language that The Peace Corps had taught the volunteers, and, um, I was one white kid in the whole school. And it was pretty intense. The teachers– the teachers came to my parents and were like this is not working for your daughter. You need to put her in a school where the instruction happens in English and there’s a wider range of kids, and so I got sent to a private school that my parents were very politically uncomfortable about but, because it was for, like, it was for rich kids, and so there were white kids and Black kids and Indian kids. But everybody was wealthy, and of course my parents, being Americans, were wealthy, which they weren’t used to either because my dad was a public high school teacher. But in Kenya he was wealthy.

My mom had nothing to do because, um, she had been in college when she and my dad got together, but she dropped out because he was in graduate school at Brown and she was working to put him through graduate school. So, she was part-time secretary jobs, things that you could do when you had five kids under the age of six at home. Which is not much and, um, so she started volunteering for the Red Cross when we were in Kenya. And doing childhood immunizations and stuff like that. She would tell a story about how she– the women would bring their kids and wait to be immunized so they’re doing nutrition and things like that, and they would be like, “How many children do you have?” And she would say, “Three,” and they would be like, “Oh, I'm so sorry, that’s so sad.” And my mom would be like, “Oh no, it’s fine,” and then they would be like, “Well, how many do you have still alive?” And she would say three, and they would be [gasp] like, how could it be that you only had to go through childbirth three times and still get three living children? So, yeah, all of my kids have been vaccinated for everything. It’s hard in America because when you’re thinking about risks it’s like, “Well, on the one hand there is a small, but real to vaccines and on the other hand, what?” Like, in America you haven’t seen the what– you haven’t seen the thing that’s being prevented by that small, but real risk. My mom saw that.

[Annotation 8]

5:03

In Kenya. I’ve been vaccinated for yellow fever, all kinds of weird shit. When you take your children to Africa in the seventies they get vaccinated for a lot of things. But anyway, so that was that experience, and then we came back. By the time we came back I didn’t want to leave Kenya either. I’m not a good transition person maybe. So, by the time we came back I was very homesick for Kenya. And so, being uprooted twice in that time period, by the time we got back I was kind of a misfit. And we were living in [Redacted], California. It’s a very white, very wealthy community. I think the average home price now is probably close to 3 million dollars. At that time, when my parents bought their house there, it was still mostly white. And has a kind of ugly racial history past, but it was affordable, so a lot of weird people were living there still. There were a lot of homes where a whole bunch of stewardesses would rent a house together at the beach because LAX was within driving distance. And so there were a lot of homes full of single people who were traveling the world and stuff.

My dad, like I said, was a high school math teacher and you could have that job and also have a home near the beach. So, people did. And then in the ‘80s with Reagan and The Cold War– all the aerospace is down there, TRW, I mean, there have been all these mergers and consolidations but at that time there was Hughes and Douglass and Marky Martin and TRW and General Dynamics, I mean they were all there and it was a place where you could have a really high paying job as an aerospace engineer as a department of defense person and live at the beach and have a really short commute. And so housing prices just went crazy, and it got very, very conservative because people who work in those fields are conservative and, um, so by the time I graduated from high school from being a place where a high school teacher with a stay at home mom and could buy a house by the beach, it had become a high school where people I knew got brand new BMWs for their sixteenth birthday and so that’s where I grew up and I was kind of a misfit.

And my sister watched me and my brother being misfits and thought, “That looks really hard, I’m going to be the person who fits in,” which, like, good luck with our family, that wasn’t going to happen, but that was another thing that meant she and I were not really close. When we were growing up. So, like when I was in high school, she was still in elementary school, and when I was in college she was still in high school. By the time we had both aged where all of those big milestones, where we were together on the same side of those milestones, she had developed a drug habit, so for about fifteen years maybe she was not a person you could have a relationship with. She wasn’t really present.

She got clean and sober. Not the first attempt, but so far, knock on wood, the one that has stuck was the year I was pregnant with my first kid. So, it’s been, this year she’s nineteen years clean and sober and she’s a miracle. My sister. She is very, very dear to me. We’re very close now. If my partner and I died, she would be the guardian of our kids. She works for the state. She’s– she’s amazing, yeah, so incredible. Um, so that’s my childhood. I live in [Redacted] now, and we have been, over the last twenty years that I have lived here, we’re replaying what happened in [Redacted] when I grew up with housing and gentrification. It’s been very Groundhog Day. Um, people are all like, “We can’t have new housing. It’s going to be gross and I’m all like, you have no idea how gross it’s gonna be.”

10:00

When all of your neighbors are gazillionaires. You have no idea. And that’s, predictably, what’s happening so, like, uh, huh, like I could have done anything, but I did tell you. So, that’s that. So my mom did divorce my dad, eventually. You know, when I was very little I had one friend whose parents were divorced, and that was very strange, and you were never– I was never one hundred percent comfortable when I went over to her house because I didn’t know what the rules were. Can we mention her dad, who didn’t live with them? Who was, what was going on, right? By the time I graduated from high school, only the Catholics still had married parents. It was this whole generation of women, like my mom, who grew up in one paradigm of you get married and you have kids. Maybe you can be a schoolteacher, or a nurse, maybe. Secretary, maybe. And then the rules kind of changed and it was possible to think bigger, and I think my dad– my dad was a teacher, like that’s all you could say about him. Like, if there was a DNA for teachers, like every cell in his body was, “You should be a teacher.” He was a life changing teacher. He was a math teacher. He did everything from remedial to AP calculus. He was one of those guys who gets letters from students twenty years later. Saying you saved my life. So, that was super, that was very true of him.

But it was also true that he was a high-functioning alcoholic who had, who was very immature, as alcoholics are, um, who took out his feelings on his kids. He was never physical, but he was always scary. I remember being scared of him. The first time I remember being scared of him, I was 6. I can’t imagine that that was the first time I was scared of him, just the first time I remember. And he was less violent than my mom’s dad so he was an improvement, but yeah, so we were not close. I’ve done a lot of work in– there’s a twelve step program for people who have alcoholics and addicts in their family, and I did a lot of work while he was still alive, in the words of that, to clean up my side of the street. Like, how good can this relationship be? What’s my part? And I did that. I did the part that I could do and I was a very good daughter to him when he was dying of cancer. But I don’t miss him. I was sad, but I was sad for him. There was nothing to miss. There weren’t things that we used to do together that now I had to do by myself and feel his absence. We just didn’t have that kind of relationship. So my mom did eventually divorce him. And she’s been married for almost forty years to a very sweet guy. And she went back to college. She graduated from college while I was in high school and I watched her being a working college-student mom. She had a part-time job, and she was finishing her degree, and she was parenting the three of us. I can’t even picture it, but she did it. Yeah, it was, and my dad– my dad, like I said, he was a teacher, right? And there was no way that he could see my mom having this potential. To be the person that she turned out to be and not see her explore it and develop it. So, all honor to him that he got out of the way. That was just who he was.

15:00

You know, he grew up, like I said, in a secular, lefty, Jewish, intellectual family. His dad was an architect. Maybe his dad biologically, maybe not. My grandma would say, in the last decade of her life, she would say, “Well, we had an open marriage.” But they didn’t really have an open marriage, they were just cheating on each other. It’s not the same. It was a source of shame and grief and anger for my dad’s whole life. That’s not an open marriage.

He got his architect– he was born in Russia, my grandpa, she was born in [Redacted]. They met in [Redacted]. He got his architect degree in time for the Great Recession, the Great Depression, sorry, the Great Depression, the Great Recession is my generation. And went to Moscow, they were in a program. People have heard about Louis Kahn, he took all of his architects to Russia to do architecture for Soviet Russia. He was not in that group, but he was sort of part of that thing, so he was on a team that designed the Ford Automotive Plant. In Russia. Ford made cars in Russia. For Stalin. And it was very much in line with their opinions, politically. Their great-great grandparents, if I’m recalling, I am related to them, which I may not be, who immigrated to the US, [Redacted], they were a two-newspaper household because he got the socialist newspaper and she got the communist newspaper. And he was just not hardcore enough for her. So, they were those kinds of people.

We have the essay she wrote in her kind of ESL for Immigrants class, that she wrote, and her essay, and the topic was “If I Had A Million Dollars”, and the essay– spent her whole essay saying that, “If I had a Million Dollars, I would spend every penny making sure no one ever made a million dollars again.” So, that’s the household that my family kind of looks to for, “What is our family legend?” So, that kind of explains my dad wanting to join The Peace Corps and wanting to teach in inner city schools. And the unified schools.

When we were growing up, we never ate grapes because we were supporting the United Farm Workers and Ceasar Chavez. That was a thing. It wasn’t just our family. That was a thing a lot of people were doing. So, even now, when I buy grapes I have this luxury feeling, like, slightly taboo, but still very luxurious. We weren’t poor, but the community we were living in was gentrifying so fast that I felt like it. And also, it was getting more conservative, so we were feeling more out of step with our community as I grew. And also, my mom was very, very poor growing up, so I had a hard time spending money, even when we did have it. So, we were raised to, you know, a little bit of a scarcity mindset. A little bit of a poverty mindset that was unnecessary. And my mom has kind of had to unpick that. Initially by marrying my step dad, who was not only making more money than my dad, but also had a more relaxed attitude about it. He encouraged her to say that buying a crappy version of something three times in a year because it was cheaper is actually more expensive than buying the good one once. And she grew up in households where you could do that now, but there wasn’t money in households all at once to buy the good one once. So, it just wasn’t an issue.

Her parents– her mom came from money and married my dad. Her family was unhappy about it and cut her off. She had her own private little fund, and he invested it poorly, and they lost everything. And had to move from their home in [Redacted] up to a cabin in the [Redacted] mountains because her dad had a hunting/fishing lodge up there. And so they moved into this cabin that didn’t have indoor plumbing and she, my grandma and my grandpa, were running the hunting trips for the rich people coming up from [Redacted].

20:05

And being the maid service and the cook and the fishing guide and all that kind of stuff. And so my mom, my mom was too little to remember that, so as far a she knew they had always lived there. But my aunt is like nine years older and she went from normal [Redacted] teenager life to living in a cabin with no plumbing. Um, and so my grandmother was, like, selling jewelry and stuff to buy them school clothes. And so it was that kind of poor.

And so, yeah, politics were things that my parents talked about when I was growing up. They were aware of that, and as I grew there was more of a disconnect between the community where we were living and the political rhetoric of my family. We had all of the good, the, like, we had the Pete Seeger records and the Harry Belafonte records and Odetta and all that kind of stuff. So, I grew up knowing all of the Civil Rights songs that all of the Civil Rights marchers would sing because we would get all the records. But interestingly the discussions in our house were much more about rich vs. poor rather than white vs. Black or white vs. anybody. Which was a weird gap when I think back on it because my dad was teaching in schools that were very segregated. And we had gone off to live for two years in Kenya, which at that time was only ten years independent from England. So, obviously they cared. But we were being raised somewhere that was really, really white and it wasn’t something that they mentioned. It’s kind of weird to think about.

Okay, so that’s all of that stuff. I’m going to look at this list here to make sure I’ve kind of swapped down what I think is important.

[Pause while she looks down the list.]

Yeah, so for me, I went away to art school. Like, again, it’s so interesting when I think back on my life because you’ve–

I think as Americans we think of ourselves as individual, autonomous agents making decisions spontaneously because of who we are, and of course we’re trapped in history.  Just as much as anybody in a history book is. And part of my education was done in another country. You know, if you’re in Africa, you learn African history. There’s big gaps. I don’t know what they– We hadn’t learned handwriting when I left, and when I got to Kenya they had already done handwriting so I don’t have any handwriting. I just have printing that you can read and printing that only I can read. Fast printing and scribbly. But, yeah, it’s interesting like, um, the things I know and the things I don’t know.

So when I was in elementary school, it was the era of testing for everything and I got. We had creativity tests. We got multiple choice tests to assess how creative you were. Which as an artist just boggles my mind. And they could never decide, is this person gifted or not gifted? And it was time where it mattered because there was gifted programming.

25:00

And part of the reason they thought I might be was because I had been educated somewhere else, so I knew stuff that American kids didn’t know. And I was a really big reader so had a large vocabulary so, yeah, that was– they were constantly like, “Is she gifted or not?” And putting me into that program then out of that program and into that program and out of that program. So, by the time I graduated high school I was just like, fuck this, I’m done with this. And I wasn’t going to go to college at all. I’m not going, blah, blah blah. And my mom and my dad, they decoyed me. They flattered me into going to a portfolio day at [Redacted] because I had been taking drawing classes at the community college. So, at portfolio day you go around to all the different schools that are participating and they have a recruitment person and an enrollment person, and you show them your portfolio and they give you advice on how to make it a stronger portfolio for whatever it is you want to apply to do. And I got a whole lot of praise which I was look, “Oh I’m going to go to art school,” which of course made my parents they were like “Haha, score.”

So, I went to–

Oh, I should say that another thing that I did in high school was, my– I’m not really sure how this happened. I know my grandma was involved. I was the angry kid of the three of us when my parents were getting divorced. Yeah, I think, for a kid, feeling two really strong emotions at the same time, for the same thing, is just not something you can do. That’s a grown-up, that’s a school, that’s a cognitive/emotional thing that develops with age and little kids don’t have it. And so, my dad was like, my dad, but he was also scary. And so there was this suffering person who was obviously doing the very best that he could with what he had to work with, but there was also this kind of scary tyrant dude. And so, my sister, my little sister, I mean she was little herself, she kind of went, “He's my daddy and I’m going to ignore the scary part.” She became the “I just love him” person. And that has its advantages and its disadvantages.

I simplified the situation and was like I am going to focus on he is an angry tyrant, this is all unfair and I’m gonna overlook that there’s a suffering person that is doing the very best that he can, so the residue of that is that I have a huge chip on my shoulder and I’m always trying to whittle it to be smaller. And my brother saw those and was like, “Oh, emotions are hard, so I’m not going to have any.” So, those are the three things that we ended up with.

So, I was the angry child and my parents, I was causing a lot of trouble for everybody and somehow– my mom says she can’t remember how either because I asked her recently, it was decided that I should go to school in Paris for a year. Because I was taking French in high school. French and Spanish, but I had a really nice French teacher who was kind of the adult who I felt seen by in my high school. And way back when, oh man, way back when my aunt, my dad’s sister, went to be an exchange student in France when she was in high school, which, she’s 78 now, so whenever that would have been and she– she was much younger than my dad was, uh, she ended up not liking the host family and switching to another family, and the daughter of that family then came and stayed with my grandparents, and now for decades we have had connections with this family, and so my cousin had gone and stayed with this family, and now it was my turn to go do that. So, it was an exchange thing, but privately organized and so that was another thing that kind of made me not fit back into my American high school. And so, and to have this kind of weird, disconnected educational profile where I didn’t really know where I fit in because my education was like, this from here and this from there and this from this other place and I couldn’t see myself doing it.

30:00

So, I went to art school, but when I came back from France, I had started a relationship with this guy. High school sweethearts, you know, we were, like, so in love. And he went to [West Coast university] and I went to [East Coast University] in [Redacted] and we pinned. And then I moved out to Portland to– it’s not as bad as it sounds. He did apply to [Redacted], so he was also willing to go out there, but I got accepted into an art school in Portland and he got accepted into [Redacted], and we looked at the things and it just didn’t make sense, so I moved to Portland and, uh, and that’s how I got my art degree. It was a very small college. I think it had 168 students at the time. There were 34 in my graduating class. It was mostly returning students so I was one of a handful who had gone straight from high school, which made for a really great educational experience.

I know now as an adult that when you are paying for your tuition in money you’re actually earning in real time and pushing aside a job and maybe working four or ten hour days to have a day where you can go take classes, you don’t piss that away by not doing your homework, so the level of commitment by my fellow students was really high. But they were all grown-ups so I partied at the college where my boyfriend was at, which was a very good college for partying, so that worked out well. And then we broke up and blah, blah blah.

And then I graduated into a recession in Oregon. Portland in the ‘80s, if you’re familiar with Portland from, like, Grunge, or Portland from Portlandia, or Portland from being the place where all the priced-out Californians move, it was not that place in the ‘80s, it was very, very depressed. There was a mono-economy of timber extraction. That was falling apart. The blame was being put on environmental laws. The Northern Spotted Owl was a big one, but what was– and that is an argument, but in addition, the timber companies that used to cut the logs down in Oregon and then mill them into lumber, in Oregon, were cutting the logs down and then sending them to Malaysia to be milled there and then having them reimported as finished lumber. And so all of those jobs were gone and so it wasn’t necessarily about the owls. But like Kentucky or West Virginia, anywhere where the economy is dominated by some type of resource extraction you don’t have, it’s not a diverse economy, and people who have grown up expecting that they are going to be employed in that kind of an industry don’t necessarily have the resources to pivot when those jobs go away. Like the educational structures aren’t there, the pathways aren’t there, the networks aren’t there. And Oregon’s an incredibly white state and that was part of it too. People these days think of Oregon as being kind of this lefty, weirdo funhouse, but in the ‘80s it really wasn’t and so– and the art scene was super, you know, paintings of salmon and Douglas firs and people would joke that the only way to have a show in Portland was to have a show in New York.

[Editor’s Note: A mono-economy or mono-culture is an economy that is reliant on only one industry or crop, in this case timber extraction.]

The collectors that existed in Oregon were very insecure about their own taste and they– they were– they did not get interested. I think they just were–they wanted– maybe they wanted the markers of the art world and they couldn’t have that unless it was somebody who has exhibited in the art world in Portland. And it was not the art world. And then I had to pay off my student loans, so I took a job teaching English in Japan because you could do that. It was a bubble economy and off I went.

35:00

I was a painter. I started out as an illustration major because growing up in my house it was always like, “How am I going to make a living?” Like I said, we weren’t poor, so I felt like we were poor, so the need to make a living was really clear to me. My dad was really sweet about this because of who he was. He was like, “No, you’re going to get an education, not a vocation.” And I appreciated him for saying it, but it seemed completely impractical. Like you’re saying it, but that’s not what I was raised to– you can’t, like, if the answer is, “We can’t afford that,” for your whole life, and then your parent is just like, “No, don’t worry about that,” it’s like what? So, I was an illustration major because you could get a job in that.

But Portland in the ‘80s, if you wanted to be in the art world, like, in that kind of, in the commercial art world like illustration, graphic design, that kind of stuff, I know now, I didn’t know then because I was only 18, you have to be where that industry is, right? I taught at a high school in [Redacted]. I was teaching letterpress printing to graphic design students, and some of the students were really unhappy because they wanted to do editorial design, like publishing and I said, “But there are no publishers here. If that’s what you want to major in, you need to be in a school on the East Coast.” Because that’s where publishing is. There was nothing in Portland. So, being in commercial art, in illustration, in Portland, like why? There were no, we had Nike, but like Nike was this big at the time and that was it. We had the Will Vincent Animation Studios, the guys that did the “Heard it through the Grapevine” California Raisins commercial with the claymation. That was it. We had Nike, little baby Nike, and we had dancing raisins. That was it. So, making a living as an illustrator, so as a result the illustration majors ended up being kind of just the girls who were going to do it until they got married. And there were sporty girls and cutesy girls and no matter what the illustration was, like, design a commemorative stamp, the sporty ones would do tennis and skiing and the cutesy ones would do teddy bears and roses, and, like, the teachers sucked too because it was– it was not a good department.

And I came to realize that the classes where the interesting conversations were, where the interesting students were, where I was feeling really challenged, were the classes that were filled with painting majors and it was like, “Oh okay, so maybe this is how I get the most out of this is I take those classes with those people.” So, I kind of did do what my dad said about education and vocation. But I wasn’t really a painter. I wanted to be an artist, but actually making the art. I just wanted the noun, you know? There was an identity that I wanted, an imagined life that I wanted. You know, if the shoemaker and the elves and the elves make the shoes and it’s like, “Oooh, we’ve been saved from destruction. Where did these shoes come from?” If I could have woken up one morning and found, like, a stack of paintings by my bed that were good that I could pass off as being my own, so that I could get to the fun part of being an artist, I would have done it.

And I didn’t know it. I didn’t know what my motivation was, because when you’re in art school, you can go from assignment to assignment, critique to critique and collect like, “You’re a good student, gold stars,” and graduate at the end and never have made art from the inside and not even know it. You can be entirely motivated by praise and other people’s expectations and not even know it, and that was totally me, and so I went off to Japan to teach English, and I had all of this really thick Italian watercolor paper, I was making these wash paintings that were about twelve inches square of these kind of abstracted landscapes that were partly from Byzantine mosaics and partly from my own weird psycho-narrative. And, um, but I ran out of paper, so I had to get more paper, so I went to this art supply store in Tokyo and there was a whole floor for paper and it just blew my mind.

40:03

Like, I didn’t even know what any of this was, right? Like some of it so fine that you can hardly even touch it without it, like just the breeze of your hand moving toward it pushes it further away, like trying to swat a mosquito. And some of it is so thick and creaky that if you bend it, it’s going to crack, and I just couldn’t figure out what this stuff was, and so I started trying to figure out how to make things out of it. It was really moving and I found myself kind of making these book forms, and that was when I realized how much I hadn’t been making art before. Because it was the first time that the only thing I cared about was this vision in my head that I was moving toward. And when I was looking at it, I wasn’t looking at it through the lens of what would somebody else see when they look at this? What would somebody else say about me when they look at this? What does this thing say about who I am? I was just looking at it going, “Does it work?” And I had this very clear yes/no, it’s not working yet, keep going. It’s not working yet. And I had never had that. And I didn’t know, I didn’t know that that was. I mean, you can’t know what you’re missing, right? And you can’t see that inside a person. Like, I couldn’t look at my fellow students and go, “She’s doing it. I’m not doing it.” You can’t see it from the outside. Yeah, yeah.

So, I did that for a couple years. I got as good at teaching as you can get if you don’t actually know what you’re doing and don’t care. And I had to say, do I want to get better? And I had to say, this is not really what I want to do, teaching English for the rest of my life. So, I applied to graduate schools for book arts because there is such a thing. I ended up in [Redacted] because they gave me a ton of financial aid. I got an MFA for free. They paid me to get it. I don’t recommend it. At that point, I had been moving a lot. There was a ten-year period where I had moved eighteen times. Over ten years. So, I thought, oh, I’ve been to Portland to Tokyo, I can go to [Redacted]. It’s just another place. It’s a college town. How bad can it be? Yeah, it’s a college town in the Bible Belt and the Bible Belt dominates the culture there. So, that was not good.

But I got this degree and then as part of that I needed to get, I needed to get some extra credit, bad advisor, I was behind on credits, I was going to have to stay there longer and I was like, “This is not going to happen.” So, I set myself up with some internships in the summer, at, if you– if you have– book arts means in this case bookbinding, printing, and history of the book, and if you have basic bookbinding skills you can get an entry level job in conservation, which is repairing books. There are other branches of conservation: metal objects, textiles, whatever, but book and paper is one branch, but, um, so I knew that, like, the basic materials and the basic techniques and the basic tools, some of the structures, so I could get an entry level job doing this, so I lined myself up some internships.

And I love it. It’s so satisfying. I was in the basement of [Redacted] and I was working on some railroad stuff, some Western Americana 19th century stuff, and I thought, I was listening to the radio and chugging away at my work and I thought, “Man, if I were independently wealthy, I would do this for free.” I had never had a job like that, because as an artist you have day jobs and they suck, and you know they’re going to suck and you expect them to suck. That’s just how it is. What I didn’t realize is that I think for some artists, a really shitty day job can be very inspiring. And yeah, I, uh, having a job that I enjoy so much kind of does turn the flame down a little bit.

45:00

And the need to maintain and promote this other part of my life. To be in counterbalance. So, that’s been interesting to see that. But I’ve been– I’ve worked for– I did these internships, I got a job at [Redacted], and then I left that job and got a job at [Redacted], and then when I was working at [Redacted] I realized, “I’m a really bad employee,” which I didn’t know before that because, like I said, I had day jobs, they suck. I’m doing food service. I was doing working in dispatch for a courier company, you know? There was nothing about those jobs that I was expected to enjoy. It was just labor. And I was pretty underemployed for being a smart person. Not to say that only stupid people have those jobs, but that those jobs don’t reward being smart very often.

And it wasn’t until I had a job that I loved, the actual work, that I realized that I was still kind of pissy and peevish and resentful and hard to get along with. The thing is, when I was in Japan and I was trying to decide what to do instead of teaching English, I had made a list of all the jobs I had had and what the good parts were and what the bad parts were, and I generated a “these are the things I want,” you know, in a day job and one of them was I don’t want to be in a workplace that’s almost all guys and I’m the only woman. Or almost all women with very few guys. I want a mixed workplace. I don’t want to be in a workplace where guys wear ties and women wear nylons. I don’t want a job where I have to smile, because in my experience, if you have to smile, the job is really about eating shit. Like no matter what, the expertise they say you need what you really need is the ability to take abuse and not show that you’re unhappy about it. So, I want a job where the quality of my work is going to be measured on something other than my demeanor. I wanted a job where at the end of the day you could point to what you did and it will still be done. I didn’t want one of those jobs where like you start, you know, like food service, you just keep feeding people, there are always more people. And I wanted something where it was either a small enough organization or organized in such a way that it wouldn’t be possible for someone who didn’t know me and didn’t know my work, to make decisions that would control my working life without knowing me. And that’s the part that you couldn’t get when working for a museum or university apparatus.

They’re relentlessly, inevitably hierarchical. And there’s going to be a stratus and you’re going to be grouped in a group with people who are very dissimilar to you except that they’re on the same level and then people on a higher level are absolutely going to make decisions that are going to affect you without, without regards to who you are or what you do. And I discovered that I couldn’t bear it. And so, I’ve been self-employed since 1996. The downsides of self-employment are nothing to me. Because the benefits are so huge. When I had my kids, the freedom to live my values, you know, if I can put my family first without having to ask permission from anybody, and, uh, that’s so important to me. What I’m willing to do when I want to is so huge, and what I’m able to do when I’m forced is so small. I will cut my nose off to spite my face 99 times out of 100 if I feel like I’m being forced. Just the frustration that bubbles up from that feeling of being under someone’s thumb is so strong that anything I’m good at or good for just goes out the window. So being self-employed has been the way to do it.

50:00

I’ve got, you know, I’m taking drumming and loving it and it’s really interesting because, so because my dad was so ill last week I had to cancel my lesson, and it was before, it was after the cancellation period, so I had to pay for it anyway, and this is a person that is a friend of mine and was a little like I’m sorry, but it’s the policy and I was like, “It’s fine.” Like on the one hand you texted me to say, “How’s your stepdad doing,” because we’re friends, and on the other hand I pay you the $100 bucks because I canceled the same day as the lesson. Like there’s no conflict there and, as a self-employed person, I’ve had to do that too. I have a rule that, um, I have two prices: one is free, if you’re a friend or family or somebody that I want to do it for and the other is full price. I don’t have an in-between and I don’t because I tried it and it was terrible. The friends or families would think they were doing me a favor by bringing me work. I have so much work. And I was thinking I was doing them a favor by giving them a discount, and when each person thinks that they’re the benefactor and the other person thinks they’re the beneficiary, that’s just bad. And so, either it’s free and you know I’m doing you a favor or I charge you full price and you know that you can bug me if I don’t get it done fast enough.

And yeah, so the self-employment thing has got its pitfalls, but I love it. It’s what’s unlocked my ability to be an effective person in the world, to have a career that I care about and to be a good friend and to be a good parent and to be a good partner. So that was very transformative.

What else? I kind of think that’s about it. Does that serve you better? Is that the things that you need more? I’m looking over it. [hums and sings to self while looking down the list]

52:50

[Redacted], do you want to at all talk about your kids?

Yeah, yeah, I can talk about them. I have two. I was 40 when I had the first. I’ve been pregnant as far as I know five times, so an abortion, two miscarriages, two kids, um, the miscarriages were a bummer, as they are, but it was very interesting because I was very ambivalent about becoming a parent. I watched my mom juggle and it looked hard, right? So, I wasn’t sure, will I lose myself if I do this? And, like, so when I had the first miscarriage I was really interested to see, like, “Am I a hundred percent bummed or am I only like fifty percent bummed. Am I, like, sad, or like oh, dodged a bullet.” Because you know how sometimes you can’t make up your mind so you flip a coin and you get the wrong thing and like, “Oh, there’s a wrong thing. I didn’t know I had a preference.” So, it’s a little bit like that. I did all these, my partner was very clear that he wanted to have kids and that was on the table from the first time that we started this most recent version of our relationship. So, I had to think about it. I flipped a coin; it didn’t help. I thought about everything and finally what I thought about was like, “Well, like having kids or not having kids, which one is scarier?” And I thought, “Oh, having kids is way scarier.” And I thought, “Okay, if it’s that much scarier and thought of having kids not having kids are even, then I thought probably the wanting kids is stronger and it’s the fear that’s pushing it down so it looks like I could go either way.” I thought, “Okay,” so under that understanding is how I got pregnant the first time.

[Annotation 9]

And, uh, so when it didn’t take, I was really interested to see how upset I was. And, so we tried again, and I had a miscarriage again. And that was a bummer, especially because like two in a row and you’re like, “Uh-oh, is this going to happen at all.” But going through it with my partner, he was a good partner through this experience and so I felt, oh I felt, “Pregnancies are a lot more fragile than I thought,” but also if we get to be parents together, we might be better at it than I had been afraid of, so that was good. The time that I was going through it, it was like, “Oh, poor me, oh poor me,” but when I look back on it, I got pregnant four times in under three years. After the age of 40, for free, not doing anything I wouldn’t have done for fun. And I have friends who were in their third or fourth or fifth round of IVF by then, so that was different. And I stayed apprehensive right up until [Redacted] was born, and then when they were born I was just in love, like everything shifted around in my thinking. When I was in Japan and made my first artists books and had that, “Oh, this is how you’re supposed to make art,” experience, I felt like I was a kaleidoscope, like those ones that have the little flecks of glass and how you turn it and it’s all the same little bits of glass, but it’s a totally different pattern now. And I found myself doing that. The things that I loved that were peripheral or distracting or were irrelevant when I was a painter suddenly shifted and they were at the center of the pattern and they were what the pattern was based on and the thing that you needed to make art was there and it had been there all along.

And when [Redacted] was born it felt like that again, like who I was supposed to be totally shifted. And everything else became the day job. Like being an artist was my day job now. And I feel so lucky that I experienced it that way because I have a friend who is a professor at Cal and she didn’t have that switch flip experience, and she’s been for the last, I think her boys are, they’re twins, I think they’re juniors now, no they’re not, they’re sophomores, um, so they’re like 15, she’s been trying to be a mom and be an academic and be a friend and be a member of a religious community, and it’s like she’s trying to live three lives with one body. Like trying to ride three bicycles at once. And it looks really hard and she feels kind of guilty and behind all the time.

And for me, I feel, when I look at some of my artist friends who have moved forward in their art careers more strongly than I have, you know, I do have pangs, but I feel so grateful that my priorities were really clear and it was like, “Oh, yes, I’m a parent now, first,” and like I thought I knew, I thought I knew how to love, and looking at my kid I thought, “Oh, I am so small. I am so selfish. My idea of love has been so conditioned and so transactional.” And so I’ve been trying to live up to that. And then, because we weren’t intending to have our two kids so close together, but because of those miscarriages we better get on it because it will take a while, and then two weeks later I was pregnant so they’re twenty months apart, which is great, which is super great.

So, my first born is in college. They are nonbinary. And on their own path. I support that. We’ve had, you know, I remember, have been piously lectured about using the wrong, I remember a couple of years ago [Redacted] telling me that I couldn’t use the word dyke and that it wasn’t okay and I was like, “Tell that to my dyke friends because they’re going to disagree with you on that.” You know, but that’s being 15, right. You invented the world and you’re the expert on everything, so no hurt feelings there. So that’s been interesting.

1:00:00

And then my younger [Redacted] is also a female-identified person, who I’m pretty sure she’s a cisgender lesbian, but I don’t know. She’s dating a girl. They’re having a great time. I don’t know how [Redacted] defines herself. She’s very private. I’m going to–

[Redacted] and I, we’re a little more on the oversharing end of the spectrum. I’m a little bit like, just put it out there, see what happens, and [Redacted] is much more private so, um, I’m having to be very good to convince [Redacted] that I can respect her privacy the way that she would want me to, because she is justified in wondering if I have that capacity. By seeing how [Redacted] and I are blah, blah, blah all the time.

Yeah, but both my kids, they’re so cool. [Redacted] has a zine called Peer that, she’s collecting things she overhears people say in the hallway, and basically she’s just being a thorn in the side of the principal at her high school and, you know, they locked a bunch of the bathrooms because the kids were vaping too much and so now like–

This is an issue. It’s against the California educational code, for one thing, but also it affects differentially girls versus boys during the school day because girls have more and different reasons to need to use the bathroom. And so she’s been collecting information about the bathrooms being opened and closed and filing lawsuits with complaints. It’s called the Williams Act, filing Williams Act complaints with the state. Over the bathrooms being closed. And has a zine about it. And the principal’s not happy. But she’s leaving so, haha.

[Editor’s Note: The Williams Act of California was a case where over 100 students argued for current and adequate instructional materials, safe and decent school facilities; and qualified teachers in their school system to meet the state standards that the system was failing to meet. Part of the case was securing students more privacy and allowing them to take adequate bathroom breaks in regard to their needs. For example, when students needed extra bathroom time for their menstrual period.]

And [Redacted] off at [Redacted], having a great time. You know, they were, I told you about the time we spoke before when [Redacted] was in a class and there was a fellow classmate who was really distraught and [Redacted] talked to them, and it turned out that they were afraid that they were pregnant, and there’s a Planned Parenthood in the mall within walking distance of the high school and [Redacted] walking down there and, you know, got them in through the doors and get them taken care of, I don’t think they were pregnant, but part of [Redacted]’s thing was, I have this contraceptive implant in my arm and you could have that too, and then your parents don’t need to know anything.

[Annotation 10]

1:03:00

And I was so proud of [Redacted] for stepping up. And [Redacted]’s implant was because they were going to go do an exchange year in Japan. And being nonbinary and going somewhere where LGBTQ stuff is poorly understood, very much on the down low, living as a nonbinary person in high school in Japan is going to be difficult. We found a host family that was okay with it, but we weren’t able to find it. The agency that was helping us wasn’t able to find a school that would allow [Redacted] to mix and match the boy and girl parts of their school uniform. And so having the implant so that they wouldn’t have periods was a balancing act of a way of feeling less defined by a body that they didn’t identify with while they were there. And plus, as the parent I was happy with the idea of having a safety net against pregnancy. In a foreign country.

But so that was kind of how [Redacted] knew what some of the options were and was able to help that friend. And so when I ordered the pills for Aid Access to have here in our house I also sent money to [Redacted] in New York to have them there. I don’t know if that’s what the money got spent on or not. I haven’t followed up on that. I said, “I am venmoing you this money for this reason, this is how you do it. I’m not making you do it.” So, I haven’t followed up. It’s none of my business.

So, that’s my kids. Is there anything else on this list here that I haven’t said? That is important to you?

Would you like to share anything about your partner?

No. I think I’m going to let him have his privacy. He’s, like I said, he’s worried that I am going to experience some kind of downside for doing this. And so I think I would rather just leave him out of it so that he doesn’t have to worry.

[Redacted], thank you so much for sharing everything that you did today. I am going to go ahead and stop the recording.

1:06.04

[End of Recording Two]