I love Michelle Obama. It’s honestly quite hard not to like her. When I knew hardly anything about her, I liked her based on what little I knew. When I knew quite a bit more about her, I liked her just as much.

And I love her even more for saying things like this.

There were several unforgettable moments in the Obama campaign—Barack’s impassioned speech about race, the DNC finale at Invesco, Madelyn Dunham’s death just before her grandson became president-elect—but none meant more to me than a two-minute bit of tape, a simple but monumental exchange between Michelle Obama and Soledad O’Brien.

In her interview with Michelle, Soledad circled around the issues placed at the center of every discussion about female identity by second-wave feminism. O’Brien wondered how Michelle felt about following a dream that wasn’t hers. She asked about leaving a “high-powered and highly compensated” career.

Michelle acknowledged the challenges. She graciously offered that she missed her colleagues and her work. But, she continued, she could always find another career. With only the slightest hint of irony, she said if she had more time, she might bemoan the loss, but she “had a lot on her plate” and what she was doing was “pretty significant.”

I thought, “You go, girl!” As if working with the love of her life and the father of her children to become the first family of the United States while radically transforming the world as we know it isn’t the most empowering choice a brilliant and self-determining woman could make.

But the real moment came in the next beat, 30 seconds that remain forever etched in my mind as the final blow to an ideology in which women’s empowerment is narrowly defined by financial independence, emotional autonomy and professional advancement.

O’Brien went in for the kill, the coup de grâce of second-wave feminism. “But sometimes your career helps to define who you are,” she said, probing.

“It doesn’t for me,” Michelle said immediately. “What I do in my life defines me. A career is one of the many things I do in my life. I am a mother first. Where do I get my joy and my energy first and foremost? From my kids.”

This has been a point of contention for me since I discovered feminism years ago. I was struggling with my disability, in the simplest, truest sense of the word: I didn’t know how to handle my life. I was in too much pain to participate in pretty much any regular outside-the-home activity. Certainly I couldn’t work. And yes, I felt judged for that. I felt like a bad feminist for “staying home.” Especially when a long term relationship with a man entered the picture.

More broadly, adult life in this society is centered around work for pay. One’s job is a central defining aspect of one’s identity. If not the specific job, certainly the act of working, cashing your paycheck, and paying the bills. The environment you work in, interaction with your coworkers, dealings with the public, dealings with your boss, the physical or mental effects your work has on you. For most people, work takes up a majority of their waking hours. How can those hours not be an important part of who you are?

Higher-class white feminism has wholly embraced this in recent decades as women made the move into the workforce. This is unfortunate, because it is alienating. It is alienating to many people and many groups. It is alienating, as I touched on, to people with disabilities who are unable to work. It is alienating to people in the lower classes for whom the idyllic “career” is a fiction, or at least a very distant and unreachable phenomenon. It is alienating to people for whom the pursuit of more wealth and more power are not the end-all, be-all to life. Hell, it’s alienating to people who just plain don’t much care for their job and who wish not to have their lives defined by it.

A person’s job, their industry, their field of study, can be part of their identity. Again: for many people, it’s a pretty big part of your life. That doesn’t mean it has to be the biggest part. And if it’s the biggest part for you, well, congratulations: don’t assume the same for every other person.

If you’re still not getting it, for a change of perspective, try rereading that paragraph replacing job with parenthood.

Get me now? Good. Moving on.

I don’t particularly think feminist theory values work for pay as the defining aspect of egalitarian womanhood, as such. But anyone reading this blog should be well familiar with the reality that the feminist movement is afflicted with (rather, more accurately, afflicts) a variety of prejudice, preconception, misconception, and general dysfunction. A movement is made up of people. Messy, imperfect people, who soaked in all sort of prejudice, preconception, etc. as they grew up in a messy, imperfect society. And here we are.

The thing about this work, issues of social justice, is that we cannot remove the mistakes and start over with a clean slate. It’s not that easy. We are working with complex, shifting, messy, organic beings, and the immaterial force they create when they are brought together.

And sometimes, the solution that is best to address a problem in that messy world is not the solution that would be best to address that problem — excuse the phrasing — were all other things equal.

For a time, financially privileged white women felt a very real force at work around them: the dictates of their social class preventing them from participating in work-for-pay. This, whatever their privileges might otherwise be, was not fair. And so feminists fought against it. And, in a limited sort of way, they won. Now women are accepted in most fields of work-for-pay. They’re allowed to be not just the secretary but the attorney. They’re allowed to be not just the nurse but the doctor. And though it’s laughable to assert that sexism in the workplace is largely conquered (ha!) they earn much more respect than they might’ve fifty years back.

But here’s the thing. When this subset of women had their worlds cordoned off, reduced to a fraction of what they could be were they not so imprisoned, what was the problem?

By this, I don’t mean “Was it actually wrong?” I mean, instead, “What is it that made it wrong?”

Was it that women weren’t allowed to experience that world of work-for-pay (and, largely, the prestige that came with it) for themselves? That seems to be what feminism has settled on, in practice. Feminists fight fiercely when anyone threatens their place in the industry. And they are fiercely offended when anyone reduces them to their traditional purposes: child-making and -rearing, house cleaning, looking pretty, existing only for the whim and betterment of their men. And often the response is much like that of Melissa (whom I mean not to put down; it’s merely the example at hand) at Shakesville a few days back:

I’ve worked or been otherwise acquainted with married men who told me their wives were gorgeous, thin, good in bed, big-breasted, etc., long before they told me their wives’ occupations, or any other bit of information that wasn’t designed to convey how awesome the men were because they’d scored hot wives—just another accessory like a car or a great flat in a trendy neighborhood.

Why is it that when feminists seek to define their identity as women free from patriarchal constrictions, they almost always default first and often only to their occupation?

What is it that made that restriction wrong?

I submit that what made it wrong was not the specific area forbidden to women: it is that they were forbidden from an area — any area — that could contribute to their personhood and identity, that would allow them to contribute in return to their families, communities and wider society. The wrong is not that (this subset of) women was forbidden this particular aspect of self: the wrong is that (this subset of) women was forbidden any particular aspect of self.

Considering this, we round out the picture of what, exactly, work-for-pay means to women. It is something a large set of women were denied for a long time, or severely restricted, a system of coinciding and contradictory reward and punishment, a system in which women simply could not win. They saw that the system was flawed, and they worked, hard, to change that system.

But their sights were limited. They could not scrub the slate clean. They could only clean up some of the mess, then build on what they had left. So we find ourselves here. Some of the fiercest feminists are also the most accomplished professionals, and they have no reservations when it comes to defending that place for which they’ve fought so hard. But in doing so, maybe they — we — have let that part of ourselves consume the rest of us. Maybe we lost sight of the rest of our lives. The so, so many other things that we do, that are so important to us, but which are not nearly so highly valued when reflecting on our own identity.

Do you identify yourself, first and foremost, as a member of a certain profession? Why? Is it really the most important part of you?

Can you see the cracks in that facade? Do you see the classism, lurking in the assumption that everyone (who matters) excels at one thing in high school, then studies it in college, perhaps masters it in graduate school, and then moves straight into a career in that very field? Do you see the ableism, lurking in the assumption that everyone (who matters) works, and that it is always money from employment that pays for a person’s shelter, food, heat and cooling, yearly two-week vacations and bar tab? Can you see how even gender relations aren’t instantly righted with affluent white women’s entrance in the work field — lurking in the existence of the second shift, the fact that a spouse and family is considered a downside when hiring a woman but a plus when hiring a man?

These things aren’t the fault of women who work. But maybe we shouldn’t treat the importance we give to work-for-pay so uncritically. Maybe we shouldn’t pretend that we actually did wipe that slate clean.

What else do you do in your life? I’ll bet you there’s a lot of things. I get a maximum of five waking hours outside of work on weekdays and even I have many more parts to my life than my work. My husband, my cats, my geographic home, painting, blogging, hockey, design, my love of sweets and grains and tea and homemade stroganoff and mac n cheese and tacos, my family, my husband’s family, my friends, my favorite music, dancing for myself when nobody’s around, the joy of movement and the peace in rest…

I invite you to reflect on your own life. My bet is you’ll find much that challenges this idea that work must be a primary aspect of self for women who strive to be free.

And with that foundation, maybe we can begin to explore the worlds of all the other billions of women who weren’t white enough, financially secure enough, healthy enough, anything enough to be a part of that feminist movement. But it’s ok — I’ll give you some time to digest first.

Last Sunday, the Detroit Red Wings came back to Mellon Arena for the first time since our spring 2008 battle for the Stanley Cup.We haven’t been able to see a game so far this year. So when I noticed that there were still tickets available, I nudged my husband to take a look.

Unfortunately for us, the Penguins lost. Dammit. But I got a great picture next to my one and only crush, goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury. And I maneuvered the crowded gift shop to get a good look at the replica jerseys. There was #29. I remarked to my husband that of the three, I liked the white jersey best. He stood by silently. Little did I know.

He had told me a month or so back that my birthday present would probably come a couple weeks late. OK, I said. I did long distance for four and a half years — I was well used to flexibility on gift-giving deadlines (and actually somewhat preferred it that way).

The box finally came Thursday, while we were at work. He didn’t want me to see who it was from as he carried it inside, to the bedroom where I couldn’t see as he unwrapped. He asked me to close my eyes. I had no idea what I was going to see when I opened them.

I’m not really a person who shows surprise or excitement. But I stood there, eyes wide and mouth open, reduced to a one-word vocabulary:

Ooohhhhhh

The reason it was late, he explained, is that they are made custom for every order. This isn’t an appliqued replica. This was the real deal. Complete with the little strap on the lower back inside to tie the jersey down so it can’t be pulled off in a fight. (I had no idea. Come on — I am still a hockey n00b.)

My husband wubs me.

Anybody who knows me for more than a month can pretty quickly gather that I’m a diehard Penguins fan. OK, so I only found out they existed less than two years ago* when my husband dragged me along to a playoff game. But I took to it without hesitation. I’ve never cared about professional sports — sports are fun to play yourself, but why should I give a shit about the fortunes of this or that sports-based business organization?** For some reason, tho, the NHL drew me in. Damn them.

Anyway, I wanted to draw your attention to one girl who is kicking ass in the local interscholastic hockey league. Lindsay Holdcroft is the goaltender for the North Allegheny Tigers.

The vignettes that the local media draw up for her are, inevitably, kind of demeaning (see this Post-Gazette article), but I think it’s great that she’s getting some attention. And maybe someday I’ll get to have a daughter who can play some good hockey with her peers, gender irregardless, and it won’t have to be such a big deal. For now, Lindsay, you rock.

* I grew up in central California, OK? We’re technically classified as desert. Hockey was indistinguishable from lacrosse in those parts. Something the weird rich people over on that goddam East Coast. (Those twits are so full of themselves, we thought. So were the people along the coastline of the state, in the actually populated areas, but at least they were familiar, so they were tolerable.) Now, water polo, that was at least a peripheral sport that we could get behind.

** …. I grew up in central California, OK? We didn’t have sports teams representing our area. And face it, there’s really no reason to devote oneself to this sport team or that one except that they represent the area you call home. But nobody’s going to travel to freaking Fresno for a football game.

Well, she’s not my doctor, she’s — well, you’ll just have to read what’s below the cut.

See, it’s an acronym, but it sounds like a snake. Ffffsssstttt. OK, I am easily amused.

When I began work at this full-time job, I asked my doctor if I could increase my Vicodin dose to 3/day.

I don’t take them strictly on schedule, but it averages out to about that amount. I’ve been taking Vicodin this way for half a decade now. I began at 1.5 pills per day, average, which barely allowed me to make it through two semesters of college, earning 15 credits altogether. Since then, punctuated by periods of rest and inactivity, I’ve started my first job ever, six to eight hours a week; then moved on to my first Real Job, twenty to thirty hours a week; then spent some time stutteringly employed before beginning this job, the much-talked-about nine-to-five, with a real salary and my very own desk. Up until that last, my painkiller use increased, overall, to 2/day.

Which is surprisingly stable, considering Vicodin is a narcotic painkiller typically used for acute, not chronic, pain. Most doctors (the ones who at least pretend to care, that is) are eminently afraid to prescribe the Vikes for chronic pain, fearing tolerance, dependence, even abuse. (The last cannot be fairly grouped in with the first two, but that’s another post.) It’s very, very easy for a patient taking narcotics on a regular basis to build up a tolerance, needing more and more to less and less effect, which can head to a very dangerous place very quickly. And this fear on behalf of doctors is eminently understandable.

But here’s my problem. I already take a shitload of other medications. And I’m close to maxed out on each of them. I could probably increase my dose of a couple meds modestly, but I have been very careful not to approach that max, fearing what I know is inevitable: some crisis, some downturn in health, when I need something more to help out, but find that I have already exhausted all my options.

And the non-pharmaceutical treatments? Yeah, look, I’ve been living with this condition for twenty-three years now. I know sleep hygiene intimately. I have to pay very close attention to how I sit, to what I wear, to how I move, to how I speak, to where I go, to what I carry — every second, of every day, because I have identified many of the things that make my pain burden worse. And I avoid those things, so that there’s less pain to treat in the first place.

I make sure to get enough physical activity, but not too much. And the right kind, for the right amount of time. I’ve learned to balance on the edge of the knife, constantly monitoring everything around me, everything I do, every tiny movement I make. It is a complex, nuanced, organic dance, on the tips of my toes while juggling all the hundreds of concerns every healthy person needs pay no mind to whatsoever. And if I slip, I have to know how to react swiftly to regain that balance right away — because it’s a hell of a job to build that balance from the ground up all over again.

I’m already doing just about everything I possibly can be doing. And it’s not enough to allow me some semblance of a normal life. And, ideals and expectations of normalcy be damned, I have to do more than that. I have to push forward. I have to keep going. I have a husband. We want a home and a family. And for the here and now, we have bills to pay. And my own emotional health demands I get-up-and-do. I go stir-crazy sitting in the house by myself every day. I want to go out and do something. And we aren’t privileged enough to be able to afford for that to be art classes and volunteering.

Because of all of this, I take Vicodin. Anybody who wants to fight with me at this point about it can go suck a rotting tree stump. It’s my fucking life, and I know what works for me. Piss off.

***

Two and a half months ago, now, I asked my doctor to increase my dose to 3/day. I did a lot of thinking and I really felt like that would be a sufficient number. Over the first couple weeks I settled into a schedule. One half pill when I woke up in the morning, and thereafter one half pill at every two-hour interval (conveniently coinciding with my breaks) until the work day was done. Considering I wouldn’t need as much on the weekends, that left me a bit of a buffer, just in case.

For the first month and a half, that worked great. I got my first refill right on schedule. I was proud of myself.

The last month, though, threw me a bit of a curve. I got several headaches, which meant increased use. (My headaches are such that I have no other way to address them — I have to take medicine, or it will get much, much worse.) And I was a little incautious about it. I was still adjusting to this new schedule — where I spend approximately four waking hours not in a work environment every weekday — and trying to make sure I would be able to sustain the work I was doing.

So, this week, a week before I was due for my next refill, I ended up a little short. Officially, I ran out of medicine halfway through yesterday. And I had to ask my supervisor if I could go home — for the rest of the week.

Fortunately, I am limited-term. I have no benefits. As such, there is no leave to deal with. But I skip work at the grace of my extremely understanding sup. I can’t abuse that privilege, or I may not have a job to come back to.

My doctor won’t let me refill a day early. I think he is becoming concerned. And, again, I undestand why. But.

I’m concerned myself. The past couple weeks, during which I saw this whole ordeal coming, I have been chewing on things. And I’ve decided not to pursue the highly-unlikely-to-happen-anyway permanent spot in this office. (Thank Rendell for that. They could lose five clerical employees and they’d be lucky to be allowed to hire back one.) So long as I stick the job out until its end, I have recall rights next fall. And I am moderately likely to be able to collect unemployment in the intervening months. It won’t be much, but it’s income.

More importantly, it’s income that affords me a chance to rest. I really don’t think I can handle doing this year-round. More and more, I am grateful that the hiring freeze came down. It took away my chances at a permanent state job. But it meant I jumped at the chance for this job when it came down the line. And all things said, this looks like a good deal for me. Work full time through the winter — rest in the spring and summer. And thinking long term… it’s the best chance I have to be able to keep working through pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood. It gives me a schedule. Life rarely works out on schedule, but I’d still have a chance. I wouldn’t have to be altogether out of work.

In the meantime, I am sitting at home and resting. I see my doctor tomorrow, and we will talk over my options. Because I want my life to be sustainable. This is the best chance I’ve ever had at that goal. And I don’t want to lose it.

Why does the Superbowl have to fall on my birthday (now twice in the last five years)? Especially when I just moved to Pittsburgh? Fucking Steelers.

(In all seriousness — or levity, perhaps — I have been quite happy with my birthday. Still not a Steelers fan, tho’.)