I feel a very unusual sensation — if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude.

-Benjamin Disraeli

When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.

-Willie Nelson

According to some of my Facebook friends, November is an unofficial month of gratitude, where each day a participating person is supposed to name the blessings in his or her life.  I’ve been hunting around on the Internet for the origin of this and can’t find it, so if anyone can point me to the source or a link that explains it, please do!

On a related note, last night at the monthly parenting group I attend by Betsy Brown Braun, we talked about the upcoming holiday season and how to find less materialistic ways to give to our families and make the season more meaningful.  Betsy had a number of suggestions, including making one of the kids’ presents a gift certificate to give to a charity of their choice or to Heifer International or World Visions.  Other charities like Mazon or Feeding America or organizations like the local Meals on Wheels are good choices, but those that allow kids to help other kids can foster empathy and make the giving feel more personal.  The point of it all, when it came to our kids and the holidays, was to take the excessive focus off the material goods and sensory comforts that give us pleasure for fleeting moments as we consume them.  Because, Betsy told us, gratitude is enhanced by verbal expressions of thanks, as when she encouraged us to have our kids lead up to Thanksgiving by naming what they appreciate in their own lives.  And gratitude is enhanced by doing things for other people in need.

With that in mind, I’m trying to find my gratitude this year.  Don’t get me wrong.  There’s nothing wrong in my life that a few more hours of sleep each night and getting my 250-page manuscript out of my office won’t solve.  I’ve had an eventful, productive year.  None of my loved ones is deathly ill.  We know where our next meal is coming from, and we can make our mortgage payments.  I’m just tired, overworked, and sick of first- and second-draft writerly limbo.  I’m wrung out from caring too much about the recent presidential election and wish I had more help with my non-writerly responsibilities.  But I can’t help feeling like I’m missing the forest for the trees (I wish there was a non-cliched way to say that).  There have been times in my life, even in the recent years I was in mourning for my father, when I have felt buoyed by hope and gratitude at the holidays — if only the black comedic gratitude of knowing that my far-from-fun natal family has provided me with years of writing material.  So far, this is not one of those kinds of holiday seasons.

Having finished the first draft of my book, “The Rag and Bone Man,” this summer at VCCA was an incredible achievement.  Most of my frustration lies in now not having the unfettered time to finesse it well enough to send out to anyone else to read.  I won’t sport with your intelligence to enumerate the reasons I don’t have time to write.  But two of them are running and screaming with laughter through the house right now, since their school in on a series of “minimum days” for what seems like eternity during November.

So, with one week to go until Thanksgiving (and then the onslaught of Hanukah, Christmas, and New Years, with family visits and school vacations and the never-ending parade of office and school and family celebrations), I am trying to brace myself with a strong dose of authentic gratitude.  It’s always bittersweet because this is also the season, 12 years ago, when my father died.  His death, after decades of living in poverty with schizophrenia, was also what propelled me to write “The Rag and Bone Man.”  This morning before school the kids and I filled out a gift form for Meals on Wheels, and I plan to take Betsy up on some of her suggestions for family charity.  (I’d like to make it more of a family habit throughout the year, not just at the holidays.)

And as for the teeth-gnashing over the second draft of the manuscript?  Having just now written about the frustration, I already feel a little less ungrateful.

Last week a 14-year-old Pakistani girl named Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Taliban.  Her crimes, labeled “activism” by the monsters who tried to kill her and her female classmates, appears to be attending school and encouraging other girls to become educated.

This week, in my home state of Wisconsin, a man shot an entire beauty salon full of people in order to kill his estranged wife.  There was a similar salon shooting tragedy in Orlando, Florida, earlier this month, and another mass-fatality, domestic violence-related shooting last year in Seal Beach, California.

These incidents are related.  No, the Taliban didn’t shoot these American ex-wives and all their co-workers.  But the same mentality that declares schooling girls to be not only useless but a dangerous blasphemy is related to a culture where women are unsafe in their marriages and if they choose to end their marriage.  The same desire to control the minds and bodies of women and girls, coupled with the easy availability of guns all over the world, allows retaliation with high body counts when females step out of line.  It’s a slippery slope, I know, to talk about the safety and rights of women and girls, when I was the one who opted out of all but one college class in anything remotely “feminist” (a single women’s history class, which is the only reason I know the names of all the seminal texts — The Yellow Wallpaper, The Second Sex, etc — that I have yet to read).

But I did have three important learning experiences that shaped my view that education for girls and equality for women (which includes control of their own bodies and health, including access to birth control) are vital and interrelated, and can’t be taken for granted.  The first was the circumstances of my upbringing: my mother was in an abusive marriage to my father until I was six years old, and until my father’s death in 2000, even after he left the United States and moved back to Taiwan, she remained terrified of him.  I remember plenty of physical violence, but what also stands out in my memory is the steady stream of emotional and verbal abuse he hurled at her.  You can blame it on culture or family — my father was from a male-dominated, old-fashioned culture, in a patriarchal family, where other men also beat their wives.  You can blame it on the fact that my mother dropped out of college after only a year or so, at age 20, to get married, and then had a baby (me) in short order, and another one (my brother) when her marriage was falling apart, at age 25.  All of that contributed to the misery and intractable feel of our family situation and the poverty we experienced once my mother was out, sort of, from under the yoke of her abusive marriage.  Like the women who were murdered in all of the recent mass killings, my mother had a restraining order against my father.  But like the deceased women, my mother’s restraining order was a simple piece of paper against an abusive man’s rage — at worst, only as good as the paper they’re printed on.

The second experience came when I was in eighth grade.  My social studies teacher was an enthusiastic, articulate young man named Mr. Fisher.  We studied government and current events and the rest of the prescribed curriculum in 1984 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.  One day during his lecture, Mr. Fisher told us that he didn’t understand why more girls didn’t go on to higher education.  As he recalled from his own childhood, the girls were the ones who were often “better at” school than the boys, and they had great contributions to make if only they would stick with their educations.  Of all the prosaic, throwaway bits of my adolescent school experience, this was a memorable moment — someone outside my family saying that girls should stay in school and go as far as their intellect and resources will allow.

The third experience was when I was in graduate school studying public health at UCLA.  My public health classes were all about math, biological pathways, risk factors, and assessing variables that I never before understood could be quantified.  In one class, a community health class outside my primary discipline of epidemiology, I was shocked to learn that infant mortality is related to lack of education in mothers.  In fact, the babies’ risk of dying decreased with each additional year their mothers had attended school.  It was a thunder clap, but also a moment of, ‘this is so obvious, it’s hard to break it down for anyone whose mindset prevents them from viewing women as an important half of the species rather than simply walking baby incubators.’

Knowing this makes it seem like basic species survival to send girls to school, and allow them to learn for a good, long time!  I’m not sure what to do about the problem of creating boys and men who view women as truly equal human beings.  I count myself lucky and smart to have married one; now I’m working on version 2.0 in raising my son.

I’m posting a link to the recent Tumblr post I wrote for the soon-to-be-released book Dancing at the Shame Prom.  The book is a compilation of personal essays by some well-known writers and is coming out on September 11, 2012.  I am planning to buy it!  (To be clear: I’m not one of the authors of the book.)

The post that I wrote is an excerpt from my manuscript for “The Rag and Bone Man,” the memoir I’m working on.  Thank you for reading.

http://dancingattheshameprom.tumblr.com/post/30531155307/the-three-amigos

Those of you who read this blog have probably noticed that I try to keep it apolitical.  Those of you who know me personally probably know that I’m a Democrat.  If it were any ordinary presidential election year, I would be somewhat fired up.  I enjoy politics during election years the way a casual fan with a busy nonpolitical life enjoys watching the World Cup every few years.  But lately the assault on women’s fundamental health rights, through the passage of mandatory transvaginal ultrasound exams for women before terminating a pregnancy; the attempts to defund Planned Parenthood and attempts to stop insurance from covering women’s birth control; plus the Rush Limbaugh “slut” and “whore” brouhaha and plenty of other awful examples in addition to the women’s issues, make this election year open season on too many things I believe in.

I recently hosted an event to raise money in support of Democratic members of Congress, and in introducing the event, which featured the talented duo of comedian Suzanne Whang and her partner, singer Eric Schwartz, and our friend, the wonderful comedian Wendy Hammers, I wish that I would have included the following story about how I became a Democrat:

In 1985, smack dab in the middle of the Reagan administration, I was a sophomore in high school.  I’d had a mad crush on a guy since middle school, and I WAS FINALLY GOING OUT WITH HIM.  He was a year older than me and had a drivers license.  I believed that he had finally picked up on the intense Jedi-mind-trick vibes I’d been sending him for two years and was taking me out because I was the cutest thing he’d ever seen.  I didn’t understand that we were probably now dating because he knew that I’d been lusting after him and thought I would be a sure thing.

On one of our first dates, we ended up in his station wagon out in the middle of nowhere after a movie.  I was thrilled.  We were making out – a dream come true!  We were playing the cat-and-mouse game of a guy trying to (literally) get into a younger girl’s pants.  I was flattered, but I probably wasn’t going to put out (at least that night).  Yet we kept on kissing.  And then politics came up.  He said something smart yet hipsterishly subversive about President Reagan.  I told him that I was a Republican.  <SCREECH>

“Wait a minute,” he said.  ”Why are you a Republican?”

“Well…” I had to stall for time.

I had no idea why.  All that flashed through my head was my mother proudly telling me that her first vote cast was for Richard Nixon, my grandfather shouting at the television to Jimmy Carter that we can’t give in the the A-rabs, and (to a variety of Democrats over the years) that they were no Jack Kennedy.*

Finally I said, “It’s just the right way to be.  I just think they’re right.”

He laughed.  ”Okay, let me get this straight.  Your mom is a single parent.  You guys don’t have much money.  And you’re a minority in a little town in Wisconsin.  And you’re a girl.  So, why are you a Republican?”

He was a smart guy, used to debating issues in smart-kid classes.  I was a smart kid, but not used to hearing anyone except for a handful of teachers talk about any genuine issues.

I don’t remember how our political exchange ended, but the little come-to-Jesus talk killed the romantic vibe that night.  And our entire “relationship” only lasted two weeks, if that.  But I give the guy credit for being my “first time” (although not in the way he would have liked) — the first person who encouraged me to think for myself about politics and ally myself with those who represented my true interests and beliefs.

* “You’re no Jack Kennedy!” was a quote from the 1988 Vice Presidential debates, said by Lloyd Bentsen to Dan Quayle.  My grandfather definitely said this in later years, for example when shouting at the television to Michael Dukakis, but he also made similar remarks before then.