The Christmas Present
When I was seven or eight years old, we spent the Christmas holidays with my maternal grandparents on their farm south of London, Ontario. I was afraid of their basement. If you kept going straight at the bottom of the stairs, you ended up in a finished rec’ room with a fireplace, TV set, and pool table. But if you went in any other direction, you ended up in an unfinished space with cold bare concrete floors. One room in particular—the furnace room—terrified me and yet, whenever we visited, I couldn’t help myself; I had to open the door and peer inside.
What terrified me most about the furnace room was a wooden rocking horse that somehow had gotten its head lopped off. The rocking horse had belonged to my mother and she assured me that when she had played with it, the rocking horse still had a head. No one could tell me how the horse had lost its head, but I knew from my father that this was the land of the Black Donnellys where anything could happen. Equally terrifying was the fruit cellar which I believed was not a fruit cellar but the place where my grandfather kept the bodies. (I had recently watched the Alfred Hitchcock episode of The Flintstones.)
Oddly enough, the most terrifying thing of all came to light, not in any of the bare concrete rooms, but in the rec’ room while sitting on the soft carpet by a roaring fire, overhead, a sign I had only just learned to decipher—kwitchyerbellyachin—, a shelf full of bowling trophies, and a bulletin board covered with photos and postcards from a trip to Hawaii, the first trip my grandparents took after my grandfather decided he’d had enough of farming.
It was Christmas morning and we were passing out gifts from under the tree. Enjoying the privilege of childhood narcissism, I sat in front of my own pile and set to work. Some of the gifts were predictable. After my grandfather retired, my grandmother took a job at the Eatons Department Store and got an employee discount, so we knew that whatever the gift, it would come in an Eatons box and, because it was from grandmother, it would be a shirt or an argyle sweater. Because I was a nerd, my parents always got me some books and at least one nerdy gift like Meccano or a chemistry set. Meanwhile, my brother was the family Lego freak who also loved sports, so he’d end up with a kit to build and a hockey stick. But on this particular Christmas, there was an extra box thrown in with all the others. I tore off the wrapping paper and found what looked like another shirt box from Eatons. I lifted the lid and looked inside. What the fuck?
I didn’t actually say: What the fuck? I was only eight years old. I thought something horrible would happen if I said bad words. (My wife tells me that the first time the word fuck ever issued from her lips, she closed her eyes and hunched her shoulders, fully expecting God to strike her dead with a thunder bolt.) I had the Beaver Cleaver equivalent of a WTF moment. I stared at the contents of the box and quietly let the lid fall shut. With all the subtlety of a cold war spy, I stashed the box out of sight and pretended it didn’t exist.
Later, after all the wrapping paper had been gathered up and stuffed into a green plastic garbage bag, and after all the Eatons sweaters had been tried for size, my mom asked what I thought of the skipping rope.
Blame Betty
In my adult life, I have adopted the policy that whenever it looks like I might benefit from therapy, I do my utmost to blame someone else for my troubles. Since I’m not a Freudian, I can’t blame my mom for my troubles, so I turn to the next best thing—Betty Friedan. I have a theory about why I am the way I am. I think we all carry those theories around with us. My theory begins with the observation that I was born in the year that Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. Yes, I trace all my personal problems to the fact that I was a love child of second wave feminism.
I would never describe my mother as a radical feminist. To my knowledge, she never marched or burned her bra. But I do think that, like most women of her age, she was conflicted. On the one hand, she wanted to be the “good” girl, raising her boys, meeting the more straight-laced expectations of an earlier generation. Often, her mother-in-law, my other grandmother, voiced those expectations in not-so-subtle ways. (Think Doris Roberts in Everybody Loves Raymond.) On the other hand, she had moved with my dad to the big city and, thanks to the pressure of urban osmosis, my parents absorbed all those liberal citified ways. We all watched Laugh In together. My parents loved The Smothers Brothers Show. And The Flip Wilson Show was required viewing. That Geraldine! They thought LBJ was a disaster and opposed the Viet Nam War. Once, they had a man over for dinner who had been a speech writer for Bobby Kennedy. I got to sit across from him at the dinner table even though I was just a kid.
I have no idea if my mother ever read The Feminine Mystique although she certainly absorbed the message. Friedan’s message was wafting on the air; it was mortared to the times. Indirectly, I heard about it in the kitchen as I poured myself a bowl of breakfast cereal in the morning. I heard about it when my mother made my brother and me a snack when we got home from school. And then there was the dinner table conversation. It was the rule in our household, enforced by my mother, that we had to sit at the dinner table for an hour and talk!
The skipping rope was made of green and pink plastic and had tassels at either end. It was long, the kind of skipping rope girls used in the playground at recess.
During our talks, I learned from my mom that she was not Mrs. Paul Barker. I heard about her regular phone conversations with a more radical woman at church who had gone back to school to get a degree. Later, I heard about how my mom registered a business name and got a vendor’s permit. She started doing the craft show circuit and ended up doing the One of a Kind shows. When she chaired the board at our church, I heard about all the boneheaded ideas various men proposed, and how they would close ranks whenever my mother challenged them. Women who demand accountability of men are not womanly; they’re just bitchy. I saw how this sort of treatment sometimes frustrated her to the point of tears.
I sometimes wonder if I would have been as alive to these concerns had I been born a few years before or a few years after the publication of The Feminine Mystique. There’s something about being born bang on the nose that guaranteed my inculturation into second wave feminist ideas. Still raised by an “ideal” stay-at-home mom who nevertheless was working up a new feminist vocabulary meant there were a lot of opportunities for me to absorb the message.
What about Muhammad Ali?
The skipping rope was made of green and pink plastic and had tassels at either end. It was long, the kind of skipping rope girls used in the playground at recess. Three girls in all, one on each end to turn the rope and a third to do the actual jumping. That was a problem right there. If it took three people to use the skipping rope, that meant I couldn’t use the skipping rope without other people knowing that I had a skipping rope.
After breakfast, I found a pair of scissors and pulled the box from its hiding place in the basement. For my first modification, I snipped off the tassels. Tassels are for girls. Next, I snipped it in half. Maybe it would be okay if I had a skipping rope I could use when I was alone. I tried it out but I wasn’t very good at it. I’m not sure what happened to the skipping rope after that. Maybe I kept on snipping. More likely it joined all those other Christmas gifts that go unused and ultimately find their way into landfill.
When my mom bought me the skipping rope for Christmas, I expect she was thinking of someone like Muhammad Ali who used skipping as part of his training. That was the year when the United States Supreme Court overturned Ali’s conviction for refusing to report for duty after he was drafted to serve in Viet Nam. He was very much in the news then as he resumed his training. As I’ve already mentioned, my parents were citified liberals, and they were quite happy to see Muhammad Ali avoid service in Viet Nam. Why not encourage your son to emulate a moral man, even if it is only skipping? The problem is, as an eight year old, all I knew about Muhammad Ali is that he was the greatest boxer who ever lived. Just ask him. As for his role in the civil rights movement… All I wanted was for people not to laugh at me.
As I recall the skipping rope incident from my childhood, what surprises me most is that already, at such an early age, I had clear and intractable ideas about gender roles. It made no difference that I had been born between the pages of The Feminine Mystique, nor that my parents took pains to include me in conversation that often strayed into adult concerns, nor that I was allowed uncensored exposure to countercultural outlets. Despite all this, the school yard prevailed. The world of Ralph and Piggy lorded it over my consciousness. And before all that, fear. The fear of looking foolish. Skipping was for girls. Boxing was for boys. (My eight year old world view had no way to accommodate boxers who skip.)
Self-Isolation
Fifty years later, I found myself cooped up in self-isolation and looking for ways to stay active. I live in a building with a decent gym and I’ve been in the habit of using it three times a week. But in March, following a directive from the city’s public health department, the building closed the gym. I had visions of months at a stretch in a living room chair growing soft and flabby. What to do? I wondered. That’s when the women in my life intervened. My daughter was going to order a skipping rope online. My wife suggested I add another to the order and the two of us, father and daughter, could skip to stay fit.
When the skipping rope arrived, I found that it didn’t have tassels. It has adjustable handles that are ergonomic, probably designed by scientists who have tested it in wind tunnels. What’s more, it isn’t pink and green, but a sleek black. It looks like the sort of skipping rope NASA gives to astronauts in training. My first few attempts were clumsy; after all, it’s been half a century since I last tried to skip. Eventually, I was able to do 25 consecutive skips without falling splat on my nose. From there, I incorporated my skipping into an exercise routine with different stations: planking, burpees, lifting kettle bells, running on stairs, and skipping. Then repeat a couple times. I’m up to 75 consecutive skips with each set. I don’t do anything fancy, no cross-overs or doubles, but that may come with practice. Who knows? Maybe I’ll start skipping to rhyming songs like the girls I remember from the playground.
It astonishes me that I have adhered to a rigid stricture for most of my life. The only practical consequence of doing this is that I have denied myself one of life’s simple pleasures which happens also to be good for my physical fitness. Casting this stricture aside feels liberating. Part of it may have to do with age. The older I get, the less I fear that people might laugh at me. But I also think Covid-19 has been a catalyst for this change. It has provided an opportunity for me to examine habits of thought that mire me, and to set in their place more fruitful habits. I’ll keep skipping away and one day I may find I’m good at it.
