The Trouble with Idealism

by Lucy S.

                                      

Yeah, so I’m an idealist (as I said in my last post) when it comes to hoping and trying to act on that hope – try being the key word. Sometimes that “trying” manifests as action – as DOING – and sometimes it manifests as deferring action while I “try” to think of an answer or I wait for what I “hope” will be an answer. (I used to have Yoda’s “Do or do not – there is no try” as my screen saver about ten years ago…) I live at some crazy hybrid intersection between being a mom to kids that are now almost all raised (yet feeling responsible still to keep us safe); my longtime ties to the close friends and family members of my life; plain-speaking that calls out what I think is bullshit (cusswords sprinkled in liberally); ‘practicality’ in terms of home projects, growing food, figuring out how to make it financially; impracticality in trying to hold onto so many contradictory ideals and aims that I get paralyzed into not solving major problems; love for my experiences in formal education; anger at the exclusivities of formal education and the erasure of people’s cultures and relationships in various ways; my ongoing love for Thoreau; my chronic yearning for California… That’s enough – I’m getting lost trying to list it all. Who cares? Justin says that to me sometimes to snap me out of whatever knots I get tied up in. WHO CARES?????!!!  Sometimes we email that to each other and laugh about it.

It’s not like I just live in daydreams, of course. This past school year, I taught college classes for the first time, got approved for two next fall, and helped organize an adjunct union for us at our institution. Tomorrow we file for an election. Tomorrow we also meet with the president of the college. Talking with someone like that intimidates the hell out of me – or it always used to. I’m hoping I’ll do better now.

That reminds me: I don’t write like I talk, and the chasm between the two troubles me because I start to wonder if I’m full of shit when I write and who this persona is on the page and why it's so hard to write true, and I also wonder why I can’t speak the way I write – why my brain can’t produce the words unless they’re flying from my fingers on the keyboard onto the screen in front of me. I wonder yet some more whether my writing itself is just a way to write my way to feeling good or vent all the despair and – either way – not solve the main problem.

The main problem, I would say, is that Matt and I need to live separately. We’ve needed to for so long that the deferral has permanently damaged both of us and used up too much of our lives. Not that we didn’t each find ways to live with some dignity and happiness anyway, but we each deserved better.  Our lives have been so constrained by our economic realities and our deeply ingrained sense of responsibility for each other’s basic security and our kids’ wellbeing in a system that can be too brutal – and man, do we know it – that we have waited, and waited, and waited, year after year for the right time to finally fully separate.

Doing the taxes this past spring brought it all slamming back at us again.  I hate who we become in these arguments.  He had someone he was romantically involved with unofficially do our taxes (but not file them) without talking to me about it, and when it came time to do them and he gave me this news, I was so pissed off that my head started pounding and my heart raced, and what is already a stressful experience got much worse. I asked him what right he had to give her my social security number without asking me. I referred to her in such a juvenile way – as his “latest infatuation person” (how I hate that I used such a dumb term). He meanwhile probably felt dominated because what I said maybe sounded like an interrogation and lecture. I felt that he’d disrespected my labor doing those taxes for years, and my private information. She said we could take huge write-offs that I said weren’t legitimate; he said she did accounting and did I think I knew more than her; I said I’d done our taxes for years and knew the write-offs were way out there; it went on for hours and into the next day; finally, he checked with the government and found out I was right. A hollow vindication for me. That old feeling I hate so much came back – just wanting to disappear. He felt humiliated. I don’t want to participate in humiliating him. I don’t want ANY of this. I just want out of these interactions.

In those two days, I kept thinking I didn’t care anymore about the unfairness of him working so hard on this house for years and ending up in an apartment, and now I knew I WOULD keep the house and I would stop worrying about his side of things… I felt the ancient anger revive – condemnations about how he hadn’t really “tried” all these years to talk, to have any kind of genuine relationship… But that is such a dead-end line of thought, and I detest the moralizing it always leads me into – the thoughts about how people “should” try to make their partner relationships work and make them last…. blah blah blah. Yeah, sounds great, we all should, and now back in our actual lives – what happens when they DON’T? Do we beat ourselves and each other down with what “should” be?

I do want Matt to be happy – happy somewhere in his own life, or at least I ‘wish him the best’ while not wanting to be involved in the details of however he wants to strive for that happiness.  And I cannot – I just CANNOT – solve my situation on his back. I can’t see him end up with no home after all the work he’s done on this house and the others – including the Aguanga house. At the same time, I’m close to my kids and they want me to stay in the house with them – and so we have remained stuck – but most of all, we haven’t had enough of an income to keep us all going in two separate places, even if one is an apartment.

Our total income (Matt’s and mine) last year was the highest it’s ever been: in the lower $40ks. But Jonathan’s working at Starbucks, so he pitches in, and Justin does when he can, but has had trouble making enough some months. Interdependence sounds great – I believe in it… But there’s something awful about needing your kids to pitch in so that you – the mom and dad – can separate. Even if we sold the house, the rent on a three bedroom apartment (if one of us had even just Sean and Ryan with us) would be more than we pay on this house payment.  

Kevin’s the only one who doesn’t live with us; he lives with friends further into the city and is working swing shift at a factory now.

Idealism’s great, but the material profoundly shapes our lives.  One way or another, people have to meet their material needs.  And the need to do so can erode our psychological and physical health.

The other day at our union meeting a guy from their media group wanted to ask me more about my experience. I said I’d been a working-class person, gone back to school, graduated with honors, did the master’s with a fellowship there, and now I’m teaching.  Another guy said he wanted to talk to someone with more years in teaching, which was understandable. At the same time, I knew I wasn’t making my point clear.

So I said something close to this:

The point of my story isn’t self-pity. I’m not saying my story is worse than others; this is wrong whether it’s someone like me going back or someone continuing on to grad school in their 20s. What I’m saying is I’ve raised five kids; I went to the U, graduated summa, then did the master’s here; now I’m teaching, and if I had to just wait longer to make decent wages – if there was an end in sight – fine. But there is no end in sight.  The only end in sight is the union.

Most of the people I come from – my family and longtime friends – didn’t go to college, and when I went back and graduated, some of them were really proud of me. Then came grad school, and they said, “Wow, a MASTER’S.”  But when they realized how low the pay is and the situation, they were shocked. Some didn’t understand why I’d even bothered. So it impacts the people I come from, too, when they think college doesn’t seem to do much. Not that it should just be for money; I wouldn’t have gone into this if I wanted high wages, but I should at least make pay I can live on. My son makes more per hour at Starbucks. My best friend was making $17 an hour last I knew (maybe more now) with benefits, and she has a high school diploma. And she DESERVES her pay; she works hard. I don’t need to make more than her. But I can’t even make the same. I get a check every two weeks for $420. My other son started reading adult history books when he was nine, and is maybe the most intellectual of us all – but he gave up on college. The thing he’d have studied was history, and when he realized the job outlook is a disaster for teaching college history, what was the sense in continuing?  My youngest son says he doesn’t know if he’ll go to college and I don’t know if I should try to get him to go. I find myself wanting to say to him, whatever you do, don’t major in English.

What they do to me affects my kids and the people I come from.

Partway into me talking, one of the organizers started writing down some of what I was saying. They were all staring at me. The media guy said, “Can you say that again or write it down?” Another organizer said she had no idea until a couple years ago that the situation was so bad for so many people teaching college. She shook her head and said it was terrible.

Afterward, walking down the street by myself to my vehicle, I started to cry. I’ve told the story in various ways, written about it here – but telling it succinctly and straightforwardly made me hear it for what it is without worrying about whether I was 'feeling sorry for myself.'

Back at my California community college, teaching English literature and writing was my dream.  When you think of how the vast majority of people in this world not only don’t get to make their most cherished dreams come true, but work jobs they hate or they can’t meet their own or their loved ones’ basic needs or can’t even read or write, I am lucky. I should be ecstatic. At times I am ecstatic. But I’ve been so scared that it would all just go away.

When you carry a dream around for so many years, you can get to feeling like it can’t really come true.  When I was 12 and 13, I learned to ride horses with my friend Marsie – she had a horse – and I started reading horse care books from the library, making lists of tack I’d need, scouring the newspapers for horses for sale, and then I’d tell my mom about it all. One time when Marsie was over, my mom said, “Lucy, stop dreaming. You’re never gonna get a horse.” (Marsie still imitates her saying this.) And it probably was pretty impossible. But I think a college degree and then teaching came to feel like that, too. Me teaching seemed as unlikely as me really having a horse back as a kid.  And even though I’ve been teaching now this year, it’s taken so long to sink in that I AM doing it, that it’s not an ideal I’m “hoping” for and “trying” for – and maybe I can keep doing it if I can make enough money to live on.

But I’m still idealistic. I wrote my honors thesis about the importance of relationship in education. Relationship is the biggest reason I care so much about winning a union and working to broaden this and to change higher education’s trajectory in this country. I’ve seen too many of us hurt. Our dreams get crushed, or we get a dream that twists back on them and makes us pay a painful penalty for trying to do great work.  What would a world be like that made so many forms of learning, teaching, and creating its center?  Who might we all become living that way, where most people’s dreams could come true?  Idealism makes me ask these questions and imagine possibilities, but the trouble with idealism is that on its own, it can be a substitute for changing our real lives. If we want to know what that world would be like, we’d better change our material realities.