My Ongoing Battle With Respectability
Or, How To Rebel While Also Doing Adult Shit Like Owning A House And Having A Salary And Going Grey.
My middle initial, before I changed my name at the ripe old age of 42, was G. People always assumed that it was for Grace, the only name anyone thinks of for a woman. Sometimes Georgia — but then sometimes that was an only slightly mangled version of my Very Irish first name, so I was never quite sure which. Every time I heard this, the inner “acerbic wit” that was much remarked by one of my HS teachers snorts — is it even possible to have less apt of a description for me?
According to my mother, I shouldered my way into this world like a tiny, angry, pink linebacker, and it has been my modus operandi since. I am too loud, too awkward, too tacky. Back when social events were the norm, my partner congratulated me for continuing to speak over a man who interrupted me, at a technical workshop, and my only thought, the refrain that has run through my head since I had awareness of social norms thrust upon me as a teen, was “Shit, did I miss another cue to be demure?”
I am admittedly a bit too young, and a bit too sheltered, to call myself a punk. I was still wearing whale print turtlenecks and wide-wale corduroy overalls when disco was declared dead. I was in the honor society in high school, where the sum total of my rebellion consisted of being a little bit too weird even for the weird kids. I certainly pushed boundaries, but I had an instinctive understanding of exactly how far I could go and still have the “good kid” reputation to provide cover. I did discover rock and roll in 1988 after growing up on a steady diet of Bread and Roses folk artists and promptly gravitated towards hair metal (did I mention it was 1988?) followed by grunge with a smattering of electronica but I remained more or less oblivious to the actual music of rebellion, or any kind of music scene for that matter.
[Honestly, that sentence is probably fine with a full stop. I Remained Oblivious: A Biography.]
My heart may want to be a social justice rogue, but let’s be real here. I have never even approached that level of flying casual. If anything, I am a social justice paladin by nature. It pains me to admit it, but I, of the cherry red mohawk and the …highly experimental fashion sense, am kind of a fan of structure and rules. Not arbitrary, bullshit rules, like “no wearing white after Labor Day” or “girls should be demure” or “thou shalt not grow food in place of lawns, lest thou offend and discomfort thy stuck up prick of a neighbor” that exist to enforce social castes. But because of my oblivitude, I made an effort to learn social niceties and the easiest way to do this was to internalize them as a set of rules.
[Mind you, some of these need to be broken — if I waited all nice and non-confrontational for men to stop talking over me about technical things I’d die before I got a word in edgewise, so I break the gender rules about being retiring and polite and shoulder my way in like the angry pink linebacker I am, and I don’t particularly care if it’s “assertive” if you scan as male and “bitchy” if you scan as female — double standards being a prime example of rules that exist to enforce differences.]
I do believe in some kind of common, mutually agreeable framework that needs to exist in order to grease the wheels of social interaction, on an individual and a societal level. You see it when you meet someone with different cultural expectations — does an invitation to lunch involve the asker paying? is it assumed you’ll go dutch? if there’s a discrepancy of means, how do you ensure that no one is put out past their budget without offending them? Sure, you could just be direct and ask, unless of course the other party is offended or embarrassed by directness.
[I am, for what it’s worth, 100% on Team Explicit. Too many ESL acquaintances- plus two neurodivergent kids and a slew of ND friends, and a partner with an encoding learning disability- to assume that something is understood. Also, see above re: angry pink linebacker.]
The best way to sum it up is that I don’t necessarily care what the rules ARE, as long as people communicate them clearly and they’re mutually agreed upon and equitable and understood. But. I struggle every day with bearing the burden of expected compliance that came with that “good kid” label which, as discussed elsewhere, means “good at providing what the teacher expects” which in American schools absolutely includes compliance and docility and attention.. or at least the semblance of it in my case. And it’s still true that as soon as you violate a norm, by doing something like, say, punching a Nazi, they will immediately use this to justify their entire position which just happens to be tantamount to taking a giant steaming dump on polite society because it requires them not to say the n-word in public these days.
Then there’s “adulting,” as coined by yet another generation getting here and discovering there’s no manual. I can do it decently enough. I can cook well enough that people ask for recipes sometimes. We each perfected our own versions of staples (lasagne, chili, chicken soup, mac n cheese) enough that either of us can just riff on the theme effortlessly. My house is typically clean, if cluttered, despite the best efforts of 5 dogs. Laundry? Been doing it since I was 6 — and I can sew and mend. Finances aren’t the parade of flawless execution that they used to be before my partner’s career was derailed and we became less of a two income family and more a 5-jobs-in-a-trenchcoat, but nobody’s hollering for blood and I don’t dread answering the phone or checking the mail, so that’s good enough for me.
I somehow accidentally hoodwinked dozens of people at work into thinking I would make a good manager, despite saying directly that all I wanted out of my job was to be left in a corner to solve problems with nice crunchy numbers for the next forever until I retire, and suddenly the “well, someone has to pick up the pieces and make sure this stuff still happens” outsized sense of responsibility turned into “here, these are your pieces now!” which I am in no way naturally inclined towards or interested in beyond the aforementioned deep urge to be the good kid. I hate the entire industry, the structure of the US job market, capitalism, and delegating, yet somehow I can’t allow myself to suck at this because I said I would do the things.
I harbor fantasies of selling the house — after my inlaws, who we now house, die of some benign natural cause in due time, because I said I would do the thing and now I can’t say “holy shit this was the worst idea we have ever had, everyone is miserable and you and your eating disorder and your thinly veiled, hate-speckled codependence can go live in hell for all I care, stop undoing all the boundaries my partner learned while you were far away and for the love of god, STOP WALKING INTO MY KITCHEN.” — and fucking off from respectability and moving to one of the neighborhoods all my white flight neighbors moved out of so I can have seasoned food and neighbors who won’t rat us out to the Fundie Fascist Tipline for having the world’s smallest Black Lives Matter sticker on the car.
[Someday I will win the lottery and buy a few hundred “I’d Rather Be Smashing Imperialism” bumper stickers, go to the campus where mine was unceremoniously ripped off by some business major going there on daddy’s OEM dime, and go decorate the douchiest looking cars I see. The Incel Camino is getting two.]
I know, intellectually, that there is nothing mutually exclusive in striving to be an aggressively decent human being and also succeeding enough to pass. Movement lawyers get to do things like send their kids to college and live in nice cozy stone houses. It’s helpful to be the one in the mutual aid collective whose car runs nearly every time I want it to. Maybe it’s just an artifact of being the slice of GenX that’s more Reality Bites than St. Elmo’s Fire and I somehow wholly internalized the fear of “selling out” that certain bowtied shitheel conservative shills of my vintage clearly had no compunctions about.
[If you want to know if you’re old, rewatch it and see if you root for her to wind up with the Unwashed Yet Hot Slacker or the guy who wholeheartedly supports her artistic endeavors and can also eat hot food he didn’t steal. I’m just saying.]
At any rate, there is something in my relative and relatively recent solvency that doesn’t sit right, and leaves me with a gnawing dread that I have given too much of myself over to The System. It’s the same feeling as the faint embarrassment over my extremely pro-labor, anticapitalist politics being lowkey enough that someone made me middle management — at what point do you become good enough at faking it to be part of the problem?
It’s a point of pride that I am permanently disinvited from the weekly teas of the neighborhood’s Ladies Who Lunch, after an extremely blunt observation about the hypocrisy of chiding the Puerto Rican man who switched to English in his 40s having an accent while simultaneously pointing out how fancy you are for giving your cats names in your parents’ original Norwegian. Or maybe it was the “f*ck trmp” manicure. Or the hummus I brought for the potluck, with multigrain tortilla chips. Or the pollinator garden that definitely isn’t just a big patch of unmowed weeds. Or the teal mohawk. Or the eleven million pride themed tshirts I wear for yard work. Or the trans kid.
[Maybe it’s all secretly a snub for my subpar brownies, they’re always just a little too dry.]
I have managed, through great effort, to learn to stop apologizing for being simultaneously female and technical. I’ve shed every care for conforming with gender roles (even if I’m still sore that I am the lone solidly butch peasant chonk in a family of fae) and only perform femininity when I goddamn well feel like it. I delight in explaining to people that we do not have napkins, there’s this thing called a rag that both cleans counters and can be reused, and you can even use it to clean your fingertips after getting brownie crumbs on them. But I cannot stop the faint shame at having more than I need even if we are comparatively mild and dedicated to being deliberate in our consumption habits.
Some of this can easily be explained by good old fashioned white guilt. I have sat with my urge to be recognized as “one of the good ones” enough to know it when I see it and to remind myself that being distrusted is not a reflection of me, it’s a reality of odds. (White ladies: if you want a handy analog, think of your responses to anyone crying Not All Men. No, not all, but enough, and nobody gets to be a Good One until they prove it, repeatedly, and not just as a way of sucking up to get into your pants, and even still some people will side eye you for a minute. Rightfully so.)
Some of it is passing guilt — yes, I am a grown ass woman with a salt and pepper crew cut that anyone with sensible shoes would probably immediately peg as part of the Subarus and Flannel set, but I am married to that Nice Boy whose revoked man card and love of floral arrangements are not immediately visible, so getting erased from queerdom is a regular thing that I’ve been hollering about since before I came out.
But I do want to be visible — visibly queer, visibly butch, visibly antifascist, visibly weird — so that all of the next generation of larval weirdos can see that it is possible to be a fully fledged adult without completely abandoning everything you cared so deeply about and resigning yourself to a lifetime of golf outings, browsing real estate listings, complaining that Olive Garden changed their menu, and shopping for matching towels. I am from the generation who didn’t have elders left — fuck you, Reagan — to look up to and I need all my little baby punks and el jibbities to see life past 40. I want to be a raging granny when I grow up, just like my mom.
