Dispatches From a Not-So-Perfect Life: Or How I Learned to Love the House, the Man, the child
By Faulkner Fox, Harmony Books, 2003

It doesn’t seem like a difficult life. Writer Faulkner Fox has two children, a loving husband, a nice house and a professional career. Her husband arranges his working hours (he’s a university professor) to take care of the kids as much as possible and cook most of the meals, and the couple employs a babysitter for four hours every weekday so that Fox can write. The family has, apparently, no financial problems, and everyone is healthy (at least physically). Yet Fox isn’t happy; she is obsessed with a perceived inequity between herself and her husband in regard to childcare and domestic chores - she keeps a chart for evidence - and she resents the intrusion of her maternal role on her quest for self-realization.

Fox’s story drew my attention because her situation is so similar to my own, with some critical differences: I have 50 percent more children than she does, I don’t have a babysitter who allows me to work for half of every day (except when my mother-in-law visits), and I am a man. More significantly, I am not possessed of Fox’s pathological egotism, a condition that makes her think that her behavior is justified, common and, most of all, worthy of being detailed in a published account.

Fox’s biography is, to a point, the textbook illustration of the late-twentieth century American dream. Her upper middle-class upbringing set her on the path to an Ivy League education, the realization of her adolescent dreams of family life and career success. But between the lines of her life story are hints of a perpetual immaturity that would lead to her emotional downfall - lots of recreational drug use, casual sex and academic vacillation - and an attentive reader will not be surprised that Fox has a hard time appreciating her good fortune. She goes so far as to recreate her bachelorette apartment in the garage so that she can pretend, for part of the day, that she is free from her family and once again living the carefree life of an unattached young woman.

Not only does she fail to recognize how good she has it, she insists on blaming everyone else for problems that she doesn’t actually have. She is depressed for no good reason - in itself, a peculiarly American condition - but she looks beyond the mirror for an explanation: to her kids, her husband, men in general, and American culture overall.

Fox emphatically denies personal responsibility for her unhappiness. Her career dissatisfaction is blamed on a patriarchal academic system in which men are given most of the respectable jobs, not on her decision to drop out of grad school (thereby failing to obtain the PhD that would qualify her for a full-time teaching position like her husband’s) in order to write magazine articles about voodoo and work for a political action group.

When a therapist begins to suggest that Fox could, in effect, be the perpetrator of her own psychic unrest, Fox abandons therapy. For the reader, though, the therapist’s words suggest that there’s something at work here that’s sadder than sexist social structures. In a chapter in which Fox decries the societal expectation of maternal selflessness, her logic becomes disconcertingly skewed. Why, she asks, do we expect mothers to endure the harmful rigors of breast-feeding (which have to do with calcium deficiency), yet we condemn mothers who engage in other self-destructive behavior, such as drug abuse, suicide and self-mutilation? It is unclear whether we are to conclude that breast-feeding is an oppressive tool of the masculine establishment, or that mothers should be encouraged to engage in self-mutilation as a path to self-actualization. Either way, Fox starts to sound, to the rational reader, dangerously unbalanced.

Fox is an unfortunate choice as a spokesperson for feminism in general. Her activism is of the knee-jerk variety, and it largely ignores the realities of gender inequity in American society. By focusing on groundless accusations and imagined slights, Fox provides ammunition for those conservatives who would suggest that the problems are all in the heads of feminists. She writes of cultivating a distaste for conventional American familial structure long before she had a family of her own, a distaste so strong that it makes her unable to see that her own real-life family is nothing like the oppressive family she had imagined since her adolescence. Her distrust of male doctors and an apparently sadistic medical establishment lead her to attempt home births at the end of both her pregnancies; when her second labor resulted in an emergency trip to the hospital, her unexpectedly un-negative experience (the male obstetrician was humane, and no one tried to kill her or her baby) was written off as luck, rather than evidence that her prejudice against organized medicine was unfounded. She sees the demands of motherhood, from the physical ordeal of breast-feeding to the nearly Fascist overtones of Gymboree and library sing-alongs, as a cultural conspiracy to keep her (and all well-educated mothers) down. She doesn’t seem to consider that her ambivalence toward motherhood might arise from an internal unease with her feminine biology in combination with self-induced low self-esteem.

At best, Fox’s book is a colossal waste of time. She has no story to tell, and her insights are unimpressive. At worst, Dispatches is a depressing exposÈ of a segment of American culture that is so mired in unending adolescence that it cannot see beyond its navel-gazing to the actual shortcomings and triumphs of our culture. For those of us who have grown up - who realize that sometimes we must do difficult work in order to support those we love (our children, our spouses), that the pursuit of self is not an excuse for the rejection of others - Fox’s self-absorbed whining could make us question whether an over-examined life is really worth living.

Copyright 2004 Ad Media Inc.