A House in a Greek Village

                       

(This watercolor of the restored Eleni Gatzoyiannis house was done by visiting British artist, Bill Peake.)

On Saturday, my husband, Nicholas Gage, and I returned, as we do every summer, to his small Greek village of Lia near the top of a mountain in Epiros, Greece, just a kilometer below the border with Albania.

As the sun began to set, we joined the villagers sitting at tables in the courtyard outside the inn under the plane trees.  Soon some visitors to the region came over, one by one, to introduce themselves.

This happens every time Nick returns to the village. The visitors have come up this twisting, vertiginous mountain road into the Mourgana mountain range because they want to see the places that figure in Nick’s 1983 book “Eleni” about the life and death of his mother Eleni Gatzoyiannis, who never left this village. 

In 1948 she was executed, at the age of 41, by a firing squad of Communist guerrillas because she had managed to get four of her five children led out of the village and down through mine fields to freedom under cover of night.  Eleni organized this escape after she learned that the children in the guerrilla-occupied village were to be taken away to camps behind the Iron Curtain in the last days of the Greek Civil War. (28,000 children were taken from Greece in what is called the “pedomasoma”, or “gathering of children”). On the last day before the escape, she was forced to stay behind with one of her daughters to work for the guerrillas in the threshing fields.

Since the book “Eleni” was published in 1983, it’s been translated into 32 languages. People from around the world come regularly to Lia to see where Nick’s mother lived and died. A week ago, Nick showed his village and his childhood home to 14 students from John Jay College in New York and their professor, and on August 2, he will welcome 30 students from Northeastern University, who read the book in their Greek History class.

Once the weather turns good in the spring, nearly every day brings a foreign visitor or two on this pilgrimage, although they find that some Greeks, even in this village where so many were executed, still harbor pro-Communist sentiments, and may be unhelpful in answering their questions—even to denying that Eleni Gatzoyiannis ever lived there. 

Last Wednesday night, the two couples who were astonished to find themselves sitting in the Inn’s courtyard with the author of the book included David from Wales and his Greek companion Effie, and a couple who had come from Austria, Hannelore and Claus. 

                                                                Effie & David with Nick

The next day Nick led them on a tour of the spots that are significant to the story, including the ancient church of Saint Demitrios where Eleni worshipped every day and where her bones were kept in the ossuary after being recovered from the ravine where the guerrillas threw the thirteen civilians they executed on August 28, 1948. 

  Nick looking at a relative's recent grave.  His mother's remains have been moved to Hope Cemetery in   Worcester, MA and buried next to his father.

The guerrillas had taken over Eleni’s home for their headquarters and they kept her and 30 other prisoners confined in the basement where the animals had been stabled, while the prisoners were questioned and tortured.  (It always brings a gasp from visitors when they step into the cave-like basement and realize that the prisoners were packed in so tightly that they couldn’t even lie down.) Now the basement contains display cases showing artifacts discovered during the reconstruction, including a hand grenade, a rifle, plates and cups, even part of the wrought-iron bed that Nick’s father had brought up the mountain to the village, where most people slept on pallets on the floor.

Some 37 bodies had already been buried in the yard around the house when Eleni Gatzoyianis was taken prisoner.  There was no room for more, so on August 28, 1948, the guerrillas marched their last group of 13 condemned prisoners to a distant plateau where their bodies would be thrown into a nearby ravine.

In  2002 our daughter Eleni, her grandmother’s namesake, spent a year living in Lia, rebuilding the family home, which had been allowed to fall into its foundations.  She spent nine months restoring the house as it had been in her grandmother’s life. She was moved to find that the elderly villagers who remembered the terrible events of the war helped her and donated their own belongings, including a painted wooden cradle and many embroidered textiles, to keep the house authentic to its period.  In 2005, "North of Ithaka",  Eleni's travel memoir describing that year and her experiences living in he ancestors' village, was published by St. Martin's Press. 

During the rebuilding, the stonemasons found a coin under the original cornerstone which showed that the house was first built in 1856. A new keystone over the door of the gate to the courtyard indicates that Nick’s father added on to the house in1924, and that Eleni rebuilt it in 2002.

A local carpenter carved two panels of the exterior gate, one showing the eagle of Epiros and the other representing Epirote mothers.

Here is the fireplace in the restored “great room” with a photograph of Eleni Gatzoyiannis and her husband Christos at the time of their wedding.  She dreamed that Christos would bring her and the children that followed to live with him in Worcester, MA where he was a produce seller, but her dream was blocked by the outbreak of war in 1939.

Nick took his visitors to see the spot where he got his last glimpse of his mother, as she turned and waved before being led around a bend toward the threshing fields. After we returned to the Inn and the nearby church of St. Paraskevi, and Nick pointed out the route the escaping children took down the mountain, our visitors left, amid tears and hugs all around.

(Here is part of a group of 11—two families from Omaha, Neb.-- who departed today, after spending two nights in the inn and touring the Eleni Gatzoyiannis sites.  Notice the mud swallow who has built a nest in the light fixture over their heads in the reception area.)

Like the hundreds of strangers who had come before them, these visitors left their names inscribed in the guest book in Eleni’s house, a tribute to a Greek peasant woman who sacrificed her life in her remote Greek village to save her children so that they could live her dream of America.

Kids’ Gender Stereotypes —Let’s All Relax

                                                                 (My father at about 2)

Back in the seventies, when I was giving birth to my three children, we young Manhattan mothers were determined that we would not impose gender stereotypes on our kids. (Some of the moms in my upper West Side playgroup were equally determined to protect their little ones from encountering sugar, television, candy or, god forbid, birthday cake.)

We were inspired by the  (1972) record album “Free to Be You and Me” produced by the Ms. Foundation to fight gender stereotypes.  It included such instant classics as “William’s Doll” and “It’s All Right to Cry.”

When our son was approaching his third birthday, I got him a baby doll to prepare the way for his approaching sibling. (Back in those days there was no way to know the sex of the baby before birth.)

Despite my determination not to propagate stereotypes, when we traveled to visit  my parents, who were surrounding by construction sites, Chris became fascinated by the bulldozers and excavators and would happily sit in his stroller all day watching them roar around and dig.  He loved my parents’ automatic garage door opener and  instantly learned the names of every kind of truck.  Dinosaurs became his obsession.  He collected hundreds, learned all about each kind to the point that he was assigned to teach the segment on dinosaurs to his kindergarten class. 

Do what you will, many little boys will be fascinated with powerful things: dinosaurs, trucks, guns--and most girls will not. (I would never allow anything resembling a gun in the house.  Now my son makes a living writing, among other things, scripts for video games, which feature a dazzling variety of weapons.  Go figure.)

My point is that, despite our best efforts to be perfectly even-handed in rearing our children, many babies get born with certain gender tendencies written in their DNA. And as they grow up, they will experiment, traveling all over the gender spectrum.  So it’s not wise to classify them in any category too early.

But today it has become the fashion to eliminate any reference to gender – like the “Egalia” pre-school in Stockholm, Sweden, that has eliminated the words “him” and “her”, calling all children “friends” rather than girls or boys. Then there are the parents of the infant “Storm” who became viral celebrities because they refuse to reveal the sex of their third child, so as to avoid gender stereotyping.  Their two older children--both boys—are being home-schooled and encouraged to wear dresses if the spirit moves them and to grow their hair long.  It’s interesting, I thought, that when they went on an excursion to a natural history museum or some such, the older boy asked his parents to tell the docents that he was a boy.

I think these children are being cheated because, having them home-schooled to avoid gender stereotypes, they are going to emerge into the real world at the age of 18 with no skills at interacting with other people their age. (And I’ll bet they will not still be wearing dresses and long hair.)

The New York Times recently featured an article called “Toddling Past Gender Lines’ which approvingly gave examples of parents who encourage their children’s unconventional behavior, such as painting boys’ toenails pink and buying boys Barbie princess dolls.  Certainly the woman who wrote the best-selling  “My Princess Boy” has hit a public nerve.

But the article also referred to parents who take their pre-school children to therapists, change their schools or move to a more “diverse and understanding” community, so that their gender- bending children are not bullied as they grow up.

In my opinion this is going way too far in anticipating the future sexuality of their toddlers.   I think we all should step back, take a deep breath, and consider how our great-grandparents’ handled sexual orientation in small children.

They didn’t.  In collecting antique photographs, I’ve learned that gender differences in small children were not even recognized or fussed over until children were about five or six, when little boys started wearing pants.  Up till then, boys and girls alike wore dresses or gowns .

See that child up above with the long sausage curls and the white dress and matching hair bow?  That was my father, Robert Odegard Paulson, in about 1908.  Nobody ever thought it weird that my grandmother spent time setting his long blonde hair on rags to make those sausage curls.  

Here is a photo of Ernest Hemingway at about the same age looking like a girl.  People are always blaming any issues Hemingway had with masculinity on this photo.  But I’m telling you—it was normal for the period.

And take a look at the twins in this photo in their ruffled dresses and high-button shoes.  On the back of this cabinet photo is written the following: ”Left - Louise Bertha Inez Forte, right, Louis Bertrand Forte, born June 13^th, 1893 at two p.m. in West Newton. Louis was born five minute after Louise.”

(Because so very many boys in antique photos are assumed to be girls, let me give you a vintage photo expert’s hint:  when the babies had enough hair to part, the girls’ hair was always parted in the center and the boys on the side.  Other clues that the tot in your daguerreotype is a boy: if he’s wearing a plaid sash and/or holding a riding crop.)

As you can see from the photos above, parents in the olden days did not get worked up about  “non-stereotypical gender behavior” and they did not decide that a boy in hair bows and ruffles was fated to grow up gay.  (The most shocking example of anticipating gender choices given in the New York Times' piece is the following paragraph: “Diane Ehrensaft, a therapist in Oakland, Calif., said that a parent  might say to her, "I know my child is transgender and I’m ready to go with hormone blockers.’ Her sensible response: “Whoa, not so fast!”')

Some children will grow up to be gay and some will decide they are transgender, and parents are to be applauded for accepting and supporting those statements, but no decisions should be made by anyone about behavior of children younger than puberty.  Everyone experiments with gender roles and changes often.  I smile when I see tabloid headlines like,  “Angelina is raising Shiloh to be a Boy!”

Angelina Jolie is just wisely allowing Shiloh to dress the way she likes. She’s five.  I can’t help thinking of a friend whose granddaughter, at the age of three, went through a “Goth” phase.  She would wear no dresses and no colors—only black.    Nobody gave her any grief about it, and now she’s decided to wear frilly dresses as well as black overalls.  I understand perfectly why Shiloh wants to look and act like a boy:  her two oldest siblings are boys and to her they’re cool and she wants to be like them.

While I don’t encourage anyone to decide their child’s gender orientation when they’re still children, let me tell you about the  Zapotec Indians on the Isthmus of Tehuantopec in Mexico.  Theirs is a matriarchal society where the women handle the money and pretty much call the shots, while the men busy themselves hunting prey like iguanas.

Most Zapotec families hope to have a gay son who can provide help and support  the parents.  These boys are selected (or identified) when they’re young and trained in “female” arts like embroidery, music, hair-dressing, cooking—you get the idea.  Many of these “Muxes” as they are called, dress as women throughout their lives, others dress as men, and they all are honored by the church with a special mass and fiesta (with dancing and parades) in November on the feast day of San Vincente Ferrer.  If you want to read an article about them written for Travel and Leisure by daughter Eleni Gage, click here.

As I said, I’m against making gender-decisions about one’s children at an early age, but it seems to work for the Muxes.  But for young parents in the United States, determined to protect their children from ostracism and bullying before they enter kindergarten, I think we should all step back and relax and wait to see what gender decisions the children make for themselves when they are old enough to decide their future.

Which Travel Photos Should I Submit?

(Please click on the photos to see them whole)

I was looking through the new (August) issue of  Smithsonian Magazine when I saw the winners of their 8^th annual photo contest.   The Grand Prize winner, by Prakash Hatvalne, showed two dancers in Bhopal, India preparing for their performance.  If you want to see the fifty finalists that the judges chose out of  52,000 entries, click here.

I immediately decided to enter some of my own travel photos in the 9^th annual contest, which  is open until December 1, 2011.This is more than a little presumptuous, since most of this year’s 50 finalists seem to be professional- quality photographers, and their work is amazing.  You can enter up to seven photographs in each of five categories:  Americana, The Natural World, People, Altered Images and Travel.

Almost all my own favorite photographs are in the  “people” category – most often children and sometimes old people. That’s true of my paintings as well. Here is my all-time favorite photograph.  It’s a little girl begging on the street in Jodhpur, India.  She’s made up to look like a Hindu goddess, because the religion emphasizes giving money and food to holy persons (and sacred cows), which wins you good karma.

My photographer friends generally spend a lot of time setting up a photograph but this one happened so fast I didn’t even know what I had until afterwards.  It was sheer luck. We were riding in the back of an auto rickshaw in a street crowded with people, cows, vehicles, and beggars.  The rickshaw driver paused, this child popped up beside me looking beautiful and forlorn, and the rickshaw started up again before I could reach for some coins to put in her bowl. But I reflexively got the shot of a lifetime.  I posted it with other photos while discussing “Child Beggars in India” on Jan. 23, 2009, and I think this photo is the reason that essay is a perennial in the stats listing the top ten posts on “A Rolling Crone.”

Here is my next favorite photo—also of a little girl who is trying to scrounge some money for her family while cheerfully carrying her little brother on her back.  When I was walking around San Cristobal, Chiapas, Mexico in 2009, I encountered her and lots of her friends, all selling cheap jewelry. The first day I ran into her, she was unencumbered by her sibling, but she was always smiling. And yes, I bought some of her bracelets.

Back to India—this “desert dancer”, as I call her, found us in the Thar Desert outside of Jaiselmar, Rajasthan, India, close to Pakistan.  We had just dismounted from camels and were surrounded by nothing but sand dunes as far as the eye could see.  This girl and her younger sidekick appeared out of nowhere, determined to dance for us.  They would not take no for an answer. I still don’t know why the shadows on the dunes came out this beautiful pinky purple color. Which one of these two photos do you like better?   Maybe the one on the right?

The younger girl did not have the chutzpah and persistence of the older one, but she was watching and learning.

All of the photos above would be entered in the “People” category.  Here are a couple more that I’m considering:

A crone from San Cristobal, Chiapas, Mexico.

A blind trumpeter in Puebla, Mexico.

The unexpected and sophisticated juxtaposition of saturated colors that you find everywhere in Mexico is a constant delight.  Like the green and yellow walls behind the crone above, and the amazing colors in this photograph of a woman selling nuts and sweets in Puebla. This one would probably belong in the “travel” category.

Repetitive patterns always attract my camera’s lens, which is why I like this photo of boats and people sitting on one of the “ghats” on the edge of the Ganges in the holy city of Varanasi, India.

And the pattern of the tiles on the wall behind the identically dressed graduates in the square in Puebla, Mexico also beguiled me. (Puebla is a dream for anyone who likes to photograph angels and tiles.)

Finally, I suppose in the “travel” category, I’m considering this photo of lovers under a protective angel, gazing at one of the snow-covered volcanoes in Cholula, outside Puebla.

Even if none of these photos makes it into the Smithsonian’s 50 finalists, the contest has given me a chance to re-visit some of my favorite people and places from past trips.  And on Monday I’m off to Greece to hunt for some more. 

Where do our phobias come from?

I’m proud of myself because today I survived my first MRI scan despite my claustrophobia.  I had requested and been promised a scan in one of the “open” machines, but it turned out that, because the scan was of my left shoulder, my head and upper body were inside the lighted tube and only my lower body was in the open.

But the technician was comforting, not critical about my fears.  She gave me earphones that played music, but did not drown out the loud rapping of the machine (which at times sounded like machine-gun fire).  Once I was wedged with pillows and slid inside and felt the first wave of panic, I shut my eyes and kept them shut for the entire 20 minutes. I kept thinking how lucky I was that the scan was only about a possible torn rotator cuff. I overhead a woman saying to a male patient who went in ahead of me: “I’ll be praying”, so I knew he had a lot more reason than I did to feel stressed and panicky during the MRI.

(My claustrophobia is not crippling—I’m okay in a crowded elevator, but if the elevator got stuck between floors, I’m not sure how I’d react.  And as for crawling into a narrow tunnel or cave, you can count me out.)

I have this theory about phobias that will probably convince you that I’m crazy.  I think that early and life-long phobias may be the result of some subconscious memory of how we died in a previous life. 

Of course some phobias are the result of traumas in this life—for example my dear departed Aunt Mary was so terrified of birds that even a feather duster could drive her into hysterics. But that was because, when she was little, her mean older brothers would terrorize her by chasing her with a live chicken.

But in some cases, like my claustrophobia, there’s no clear explanation.  When I was very small, around five or six years old, I was listening in my room to a radio broadcast of some scary program like “Inner Sanctum.”  (Radio was a lot scarier than TV because your imagination provided your own images.) The program began with a man’s voice saying something like: “Where am I? Why is it so dark in here?”  Then a sinister, resonant male voice replied, “You are buried alive.”

I happened to be eating a Hershey Bar with almonds and I leaped off the bed, bolted to the bathroom and got violently ill.  Needless to say, I turned off the radio.  It took something like ten years before I could even look at a Hershey Bar again.  Because of my violent, instant reaction to the words “buried alive”, I suspect that in a previous life I died, as so many have recently, by being buried in a mud slide or avalanche or earthquake.

As you can see, I believe in reincarnation, which is a very controversial subject in the West  unless you follow one of several Eastern religions.  But at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, there is a Division of Perceptual Studies (formerly the Division of Personality Studies) originally founded by Dr. Ian Stevenson, a Canadian biochemist and professor of psychiatry,  which has collected more than 2,500 case studies of young children who claimed to remember a past life.

I’ve encountered a few such children myself who arrived in life, as Wordsworth wrote, trailing intimations of immortality.  If you know a small child who is very verbal and ask something like, “Do you remember where you were before you were born?”, you may get a surprising answer. These memories seem to fade by around five years old.

But reincarnation is a subject for another day. Today I’m talking about unexplained phobias and my crazy theory.  Not too long ago, I was at unisex hair salon and, in the next chair, sat a man having his hair cut by a blonde young woman. He was telling her how he had just come back from a trip to the Empire State Building in New York with his teenaged son.  The dad, who had a phobia about heights, made it up to the 88^th floor where you have to switch elevators, but then the father realized he  couldn’t go on. He had to go back down to ground level. The son went to the top and later mercilessly teased his father about his phobia. 

Then the blonde hairdresser told about her phobia, a new one to me.  “When I’m driving and I go over a hill and look down and see that the road leads to a body of water, I’m always terrified that I’m going to drive the car right into the water and drown.” 

Naturally I didn’t let on that I was eavesdropping, but that sounded to me like a phobia born of a past experience.   Some phobias seem understandable: snakes (that one we can blame on Eve), spiders, bugs, sharks… but others: bridges, tunnels, airplanes, heights—may be rooted in early memories of a previous life.  (Did you know that Woody Allen refuses to drive or be driven through tunnels or over bridges?) 

What are your unexplained phobias? 

Photo Tribute to a Dad and two Grandpa’s

                                                                  Nick & Christos 1972

When our three children were born in the 1970’s, my husband Nick was not the kind of dad who'd change diapers, take a kid to the park or coach them in sports. But as these photos  suggest, he was always an important presence in their lives, ready to offer support, advice and unconditional love when they needed it.

                                                               Nick & Eleni circa 1976

This past week, President Obama launched the “Year of Strong Families” to do something about father absence, which he experienced growing up without a father.  Nick experienced it too, because, as he wrote in “A Place for Us”, he never knew his father, a short-order cook in Worcester, MA, until he and his sisters arrived in the U.S. as refugees in 1949 after their mother was executed during the Greek civil war.  Nick was nine years old.  His father, Christos, was 58.

                                                         Nick & Marina, circa  1979

My father, Robert O. Paulson, was born in 1906 and died in 1986.  Because my parents lived far away, he was not a real presence in our children’s lives, but when we visited California in 1973 I took these photos of him showing our son, Christos, his first view of the ocean, and reading to him at bedtime.

I only met my paternal grandfather, Par Paulson, once.  He was stern and completely deaf and the only way to communicate with him was by writing on a blackboard in chalk. But my step-grandfather, John Erickson, my grandmother’s second husband, had a special relationship with me during the years I lived near their small town of Monticello, Minnesota. 

 I still have a small garnet ring that once belonged to his mother. I remember vividly how he taught me to shoot his rifle across the wide Mississippi river, and in the spring, when it was time to get new baby chicks for the chicken yard, he would take me down to the hatchery, pull open drawers of chirping chicks and let me pick out the ones I liked.

                                                              Ida & John Erickson circa1952

 In the current "People" magazine President Obama wrote, “I grew up without a father around. I have certain memories of him taking me to my first jazz concert and giving me my first basketball as a Christmas present, But he left when I was two years old.”

 As he knows, even a one-time memory—choosing chicks at a hatchery, showing a grandson the ocean, reading a bedtime story or unwrapping a first basketball can be a gift that a child will cherish for a lifetime.

A Crone Considers Modern Childbirth

 About a month ago I wrote in “Pregnancy – It Ain’t What it Used to Be” about all the new wrinkles there are to the processes of pregnancy and childbirth since I gave birth (by Caesarian) to three children back in the seventies.

Since Christmas Eve, when daughter Eleni and her husband Emilio broke the news that we were to become grandparents (at last!) I’ve been having a lot more fun following her pregnancy than I did with my own and I’ve learned a lot at the same time.

I picked up such new-fangled terms as a babymoon, a push present, a birth plan, a birth mix (of music), a doula, and of course the baby daddy.  (How did we ever give birth in the olden days without all these improvements, not to mention the pregnancy web sites that e-mail you news and advice every week?)

Eleni’s blog is called “The Liminal Stage” and, as she says, pregnancy is the most liminal stage of all.  She has written several posts on the topic which have reduced me to both laughter and tears, because she’s so funny, while being honest and wise about the hurdles of a first pregnancy, that I have to share some of it with you.

In “Have Ipod, Will Give Birth” she discusses the almost universal tendency of moms to tell a pregnant lady their terrifying birth stories (which reminds me of a maternity t-shirt I saw for sale that read:

No advice

No birth stories

No touching the belly

Eleni wrote that she’s much more excited about preparing the playlist of music to listen to during labor than preparing the birth plan to distribute to the doctors.  As she says, “Birth plan? Who am I kidding? …I have a feeling that the list of people who are in charge of this birth is a three-legged stool: God first, Amalia [the baby’s name] second, me third (although without me, the stool cannot stand!)…So yes, I’ll study up and write a birth plan, and I’ll take childbirth prep class and breastfeeding class and infant CPR, but when push comes to shove …I’ll do whatever it takes to end up with one healthy, happy baby and one healthy, happy mommy.”

The classes Eleni and Emilio will be taking teach hypno-birthing, which was originated in the U.S. in 1989 by a four-time mother, Marie Mongan, who was inspired by the teaching of Dr. Grantly Dick-Read, (who wrote “Childbirth Without Fear.”) They believe that by refocusing the mind away from pain, birth can be a painless process.  If you want to know more about it, here’s a video showing calm and happy moms popping out calm and happy babies.

Back when I was birthing babies at New York Hospital in New York, we were required to take Lamaze classes to prepare.  My husband dropped out after the first class, telling the startled nurse/teacher , “If God meant for men to help with childbirth, then men would get pregnant.” No baby-daddy would dare talk like that today!

I had heard from my children’s contemporaries about many unusual (to me) methods of giving birth—in a birthing tub, for example, or squatting and tugging on a bar, so that gravity helps. But last week, I learned about a method that left me speechless.  Eleni mourned that her pre-natal pilates classes in Miami had ended because her pregnant teacher, Kim, had gone off to Hawaii to have her baby in the ocean while attended by dolphins.  Yes dolphins. 

 (This image is from Jonathan Goldman's "Healing Sounds" -- "for birth meditation and deep relaxation")

Apparently dolphins bring calm and good karma and all sorts of help. Birthing with the dolphins is gaining popularity all over the world. If you don’t believe me, or want to know more, check out Eleni’s post: “The Dolphins Ate my Workout.”

Dolphin birthing would not work for me.  I’d spend all the time worrying about sharks attracted by blood in the water, or dolphins kidnapping the baby once it comes out.  But then, I always was a worrier. I was the only woman in my Lamaze classes who always flunked “relaxing.”

I know I’ll have a lot more surprises coming before I’m finally a grandmother.  I plan to go down to Florida shortly before Eleni’s  due date of Aug. 19.  I already know I won’t be allowed in the delivery room, which is fine with me—It will be crowded enough with Eleni, her husband Emilio, her sister Marina (who’s trained as a doula), and assorted doctors and nurses. 

Eleni is the only one in her pre-natal pilates class who plans on giving birth in a hospital—and I’m real glad she does.   She and her friends are much better informed about the whole childbirth process than my generation was.  As she wrote, “Not to get too Zen about it, but I’m not attached to any particular method of birth; my plan is all plans and no plans all at once. I’ll try to give birth without drugs, but if that gets unbearably painful, I’ll have an epidural, and if there’s some sort of issue with the baby that indicates a C-section is recommended, I’ll do that if I have to. Either way, I’ll be a mom in the end.”

Meanwhile, she writes, choosing the playlist of music for Amalia’s birth-day has been “hours of fun for the whole family.  I’ve been listening to it all morning, and Amalia has been dancing away.  I think she loves it too.”

Degrees of Infidelity – Which is Worse?

(I wrote this two days ago before  Anthony Weiner confessed to his internet escapades, so have added a footnote about his now widely discussed  degree of evil at the end of this post.)

The other evening over dinner, while talking with my husband and a woman friend, after pondering such gentlemen as Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Edwards and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, I posed the (totally theoretical, you understand) question:  What is the worst kind of cheating husband?

I tossed out some (completely rhetorical, of course) examples: Is it worse to have your husband leave you for, say, another man, or the trusted baby sitter, or his secretary (whom you know) or a colleague whom you don’t know, or, maybe your best friend?

My husband immediately said the worst would be to have your husband leave you for a man, but my friend (who is on her third divorce) and I both instantly disagreed, saying that, no, that would be the least crushing kind of betrayal, because the wife can tell herself “It’s not that he’s leaving me because I’ve failed in some way.  He just has never acknowledged that he’s gay.  It’s completely NOT MY FAULT.”

Just for the sake of argument, I would like to propose the following ratings on my cad-o-meter, ranging from one to ten degrees of evil.

1.  One.. He leaves you for a man, having finally acknowledged that he’s gay.

2.  Two. He leaves you while insisting that there’s no other woman, but he just doesn’t love you any more. (This category may deserve to be higher up on the evil scale.  I think it also includes men who leave you because “You’re no fun any more” or because “You don’t turn me on any more.” And extra evil points for the ones who leave because “Ever since the kids came along, you don’t pay attention to ME any more.”)  Please discuss.

3.    Three. He cheats on you with an age-appropriate woman you’ve never met. (Extra evil points if she’s 20 years younger and/or looks just like you did 20 years ago.)

4.    Four. He cheats on you with a paid professional sex worker, (Extra evil points for exposing you to a possible S.T.D.)

5.    Five.  He cheats on you with an employee—his secretary, the videographer for his political campaign, an intern. (Extra evil points if said employee produces a child. Many extra evil points in any category if you happen to have a terminal illness.)

6.  Six.   He cheats on you with an employee who is like a member of the household: a babysitter, longtime housekeeper, teacher or nanny whom your children have come to love. (Hello there Robin Williams and Jude Law!)

7.  Seven.   He cheats on you with your best friend (who’s single.)

8.  Eight.  He cheats on you with your best friend who is married to his best friend and you have always gone on vacations together.  (Although Shania Twain made this situation work.)

9.   Nine.  He cheats on you with your sister.

10.Ten. He cheats on you with your daughter (who is not his daughter.) Hey there Woody Allen!

Beyond this category of cheating we move into areas  which are punishable by law, like incest and pederasty.   Let the courts and the police deal with these types of evil, hopefully by locking the perpetrator up for life.

But what is an appropriate punishment for the various degrees of cheating described above?  And what should a betrayed wife do if she doesn’t have the nerve or the money to hire a hit man to teach the cheater a lesson?

What kind of recompense would be enough to convince you to forgive him? (Like giving you fabulous alimony or getting you a very high post, say Secretary of State?)

How would you rate the various types of cheating on your cad-o-meter?

Breaking news update—now that Anthony Weiner has admitted that he has harassed women, willing and unwilling, with “sexting” on the internet (and in one  soon-to-be-classic slip of the  computer, sent to the general public an e-mail message and photo that he meant to be private), everyone is now discussing the following question: —is it really cheating if, as he claims, he has never laid eyes (or anything else) on these hapless women, (some of whom were more than willing to play his creepy game.)?

I think that on my cad-o-meter, he only gets  to be  .5 (half a point) because he didn’t really have sex with them.   But he has terminally destroyed his career and embarrassed his wife.   Now everyone is asking WHY he did it (my answer—he’s a narcissist who loves looking at himself).  So Anthony Weiner, in my opinion,  definitely gets a rating near the top on the dirty old man creep-o-meter.