The Inevitable Heartbreak of the Ambitious Woman

Why I love Cindy Sherman, and happy birthday Fred

As a former birthday narcissist, someone for whom multiple cakes and multiple meals with a song at the end was, for years, absolutely compulsory—and the lack of which was punishable by tears—the longer I’m a mom, the less I care about my own aging and related partying. The most celebratory and wonderful days of my life are now my kids’ birthdays, when I get to honor, in a private way, my own growth as well as that of the two most astounding creatures in my world. The truth is, I can’t fucking believe I made other people. I can’t believe they are so pure, sweet, and good. I can’t believe this is an everyday miracle that binds me to other women since the dawn of time.

Some years, I host parties—ridiculous parties—like for Guy’s fifth, when all he wanted was a cockroach petting zoo, so I found a cockroach breeder in New Jersey to bring some of his creatures and we had a two-foot-long cockroach cake. Some years we just have a family lunch. Guy’s birthday tea party is detailed in The Motherload, and it will always be a day I remember as explosive and world-changing because it’s when I first realized my love for him.

I’m sorry you had to see this. Be glad you didn’t have to also eat it.

Today, Fred turns one. I haven’t yet fully written about the strange journey I went on to get her here with me. First, the IVF: Ubering home from Tom and Fred’s in Connecticut at 6am when I couldn’t figure out how to give myself the trigger shot, showing up crying at the clinic uptown for help. How Charlotte took me for my embryo transfer and everyone assumed we had a sperm donor together, and how much the hormones messed me up for weeks after (no one told me that after the embryo went back in, there’d be nine more weeks of daily shots). Once pregnant, I would never have expected how horrible my nausea was—so much worse than with Guy, and it lasted until the day I delivered. The fear I had in the ER when I thought I was miscarrying and they wouldn’t give me a sonogram. Or how the midwife I thought I’d been so smart to hire couldn’t be bothered to come visit. And then being on medical bed rest for months. Just when I thought I was finished with the “hard part” (what does that even mean to a mother?) I got diagnosed with cholestasis of the liver after weeks of complaining about being so itchy that it would wake me at night, and rushed into early induction. And then, after the most incredible birth and hospital stay (so good I asked to sleep there an extra night), came the violent projectile vomiting that required three more hospital trips, none of which resulted in a clear diagnosis. Luckily, it stopped as quickly as it started, after a mere nine days of puking through my Zofran IV’s and suffering intense mystery pain in my back, ribs and lungs. But you know what? None of it traumatized me. I knew what I wanted this time, I had perspective on how much worse it could be. I had my support systems, my therapy, my meds if I needed them. And I had, more than anything, the ability to advocate for myself.

Fred being Fred, trying on her new bathing suit.

I celebrate all of that this week (with a Lady M strawberry short cake I got “just for Fred,”), and I celebrate my happy girl with her whole future ahead of her. She can do four steps in a row now, so she’s well en route to grabbing her destiny, and by destiny I mean the balls of anyone who tries to get in her way. But I’m also reflecting on the fact that for the first time, at forty, my job isn’t a job—it’s not something I do for anyone else, I don’t have a boss—it’s the thing that makes me feel the most me, the most fulfilled I ever have. And the strange congruence that this new version of myself has overlapped with the happiest I’ve ever been, the most natural I’ve ever felt as a mother: and how those two things are profoundly, and regrettably, incompatible. You can’t have it all, because the thing you need to indulge your every want as a mother and your every inspiration as a working writer is time, and that’s not a negotiable commodity. With all the help in the world, the logistical fact is that every second I spend writing is a second I can’t spend with my kids and I find myself measuring, balancing, blending—but never able to do both with the luxury of not worrying about and feeling distracted by the other. I’ve faced this realization with grief. There is no cracking of this code. And while I believe women are so incredibly emotionally complex and nuanced that they contain many identities within them and deserve to explore them all…I do not believe there is a way to do right by any single one at once. Maybe the pain of this is what makes us so special? Maybe the grief we feel when confronted, over and over again with the impossibility of having it all while still trying to have it all is what makes us deeply feeling, compassionate, and empathetic?

If you wanted to look at politically radical art in the early 1970s, you’d go down to Soho, find 96 Prince Street, and visit Paula Cooper Gallery. If you had extra time, you’d go upstairs to see whatever exhibition was on at one of the more alternative scenes in the art world, Artist Space. And if you were polite, and said hello to the front desk girls, known today as gallerinas (I’m allowed to use this slur because I am one), you’d see a young, costumed woman working away. One visit she would be dressed like a nurse, another like a Hollywood starlet, or maybe a 1950s secretary. If you were interested, and starting chatting with her, maybe she’d show you the photographs she took in her spare time, of herself in thrift store ensembles, playing all the different parts that women are prescribed. These 8x10 black and whites would end up putting her on the map, and make her one of the great contemporary art stars--in fact, in 2011, one of her works sold at Christies and at the time was the most expensive photo ever sold, by anyone of any sex. She called them Untitled (Film Stills), and her name is Cindy Sherman.

Cindy Sherman. Untitled Film Still #21, 1978. Gelatin silver print, 7.5x9.5 inches

In feminist thought at the time, women were finally considered an unfixed category, and the goal of the era’s most progressive feminist art was not to dissect and embrace the evolving definition of female, but to analyze how male authority and standards marginalized women. Representation was considered inherently politically motivated in that it reflected a culture’s vision—and in a society controlled by men, representation of women has always been through the perception, or the gaze, of men. Cindy made what looked like stock film photography into a feminist critique of how women are represented by male-dominated media—in on the joke, she made 70+ photos of “types” of women in the original series of black and white Film Stills. In later bodies of work, Cindy has used increasingly elaborate makeup, costume, prosthetics and photoshop techniques to explore how women are represented, how the male gaze dictates ones’ own construction of identity, and how that can be subverted.

Cindy Sherman. Untitled (Self-Portrait with Sun Tan), 2003. C—print. 24 3/8x15 5/8 inches.

The idea of prescribed female identities being intrinsically linked to the male gaze is something that I am sure resonates with all of us. I love how Cindy’s work highlights that within every woman is an immense ability to juggle a million different identities and pivot between roles in her private and public life. But when I look at Sherman’s art, part of me feels heartbroken that our reality is linked to the non-negotiable rules of the space-time continuum: there simply aren’t hours in the day to be everything I feel called to be.

Cindy Sherman was born in 1954, in New Jersey. She has no children. She lives and works in New York.