This week’s entry is an epilogue that feels more like a prologue, sparked by the phrase “women and children first” that came up when I wrote last week, when I said “…it’s not always women and children first. On the contrary.”

While the recent theme of the blog is clichés, and this week’s is ostensibly the law of the sea code of conduct expression in the title, let’s call it what it is: a thinly veiled forensic accounting of memories of my mom that are fewer and less accessible four decades since she died.

Last week I posted about the gender wage gap, and it made me wonder about my mom, and how she would have grappled with the pandemic as a single mom if this had happened when she was still alive in the ‘70s.

Mom was unconventional and struggled for many years to find full and fulfilling paid employment, in an era when it was customary for women’s aspirations to focus on homemaking rather than work outside the home. But I don’t remember her self-identifying as a feminist.

When I ponder the question, “was my mom a feminist” I make a reservation for a pity party, table for one, as I wish that it wasn’t a rhetorical question that I was trying to invent the answer to. (Sorry for ending on a preposition it just sounds way too not vernacular to say to which I was trying to invent the answer.)

Trying to piece together whether or not she was an out or closeted feminist from a jury made up of her own personal patriarchy is even more suspect than relying on my adult filtered take on a precocious nine-year old’s view of her mom. It’s the paltry reconstruction I can pull together from impressions of my mom from the fallible memories of childhood, buttressed by the jaded views of the only people who have on occasion spoken to me about her since her death in 1981: her parents, her ex-husband, her brothers, and her son.

My mom was a square in the beat era, a Minnesota transplant to the Bay Area, living in the Haight a decade before it was the epicenter of edgy. She got there by bus from a Navajo Indian reservation where she had been teaching, until the inebriated father of one of her students got too handsy and she beat a hasty retreat for points west.

When the only place you’ve ever lived is Winona, Minnesota, and your heretofore longest trips were to Wisconsin and Iowa, flinging all your worldly possessions into a VW Beetle and hitting the open road to New Mexico is a pretty bold move. And when it goes tango-uniform, instead of returning home with your tail between your legs, you get on a bus bound for San Francisco, well, that all seems more worldly and adventurous than I remember my mom being. What a badass!

In my reenactment of the critical juncture in my mother’s life when she graduated from college and had to decide what to do next, and ended up high tailing it for New Mexico – which could only have been slightly less alien than Mars – it was because she chafed at the career path she had been relegated to by my grandparents.

She had wanted to be a journalist, but my grandparents thought that was unseemly for a woman, or unrealistic, or both. It was already no small feat that they were willing to send her to college at all, as it was of little use or interest to anyone else in our family (who have been very successful without it).

But mom was different from her family, she was bookish and keen, and to their credit, her parents made college happen for her. However, the caveat was that their largesse would only be extended for studies in subject matter suitable for women: nursing or teaching. Journalism was off the table. She went with teaching.

I had a similar experience with my grandparents three decades later when they co-signed the loans that made it possible for me to go to undergrad at pricey, private GWU. They were staggered by the amounts involved. They couldn’t understand why I would pay so much to go to school “just to be a secretary.” I couldn’t understand why they thought I would be a secretary rather than someone who had a secretary.

Mom was not well-suited to be a teacher. It was abundantly clear the days she would come home from substitute teaching a silent, shriveled shell of herself. She’d head straight to the wing-backed chair with the standing lamp positioned above her shoulder and lose herself in a novel for the rest of the evening, oblivious to everything else, while I made myself a bowl of cereal for dinner.

As a teacher, mom finagled a way to work in school libraries, and unlike teaching, that was in her wheelhouse. We were living in Madison, Wisconsin in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, a three-hour drive from her home town that was still close enough to to access the support she was ashamed to need from my grandparents. She was studying library sciences at the University of Wisconsin. An emerging discipline that dealt with data management and other non-soft-skills stuff. Maybe not feminist per se,  but non-traditional and non-conforming to the gender norms laid out for her.

The night that my mom died in a car accident in a deluge of rain she was driving back from Wisconsin Rapids, 100 miles north of Madison, where she had just been hired to teach *and* be the school librarian. It must have been vindicating for her, after being perennially un- and underemployed to have gotten a full-time job in her professional sweet spot and put her on a path to becoming a full-time librarian. More immediately, we’d be able to leave the housing project we were living in and get off food stamps. She was going to flip the script on being a welfare mom and finally get back on a path to self-sufficiency.

Was my mom a feminist? I think she’d say no, but I say hell yeah! She may not have been burning her bra, but she wasn’t Phyllis Schlafly either, even if she was politically conservative. If she were alive now, I don’t think the pay gap would sit well with her even if she wasn’t subject to it when public school pay scales are based on education and tenure, not gender.

A brave and wise woman, from a political party that was decidedly not my mom’s, famously said that women’s rights are human rights. My mom, who saw injustice up close and personal on the Indian reservation and in the projects, would have endorsed that, even if she didn’t comfortably or prominently take on the feminist mantle.

What would she have thought about the 2016 and the 2020 elections? I’m afraid that even in my wildest re-imaginings, it’s hard to create a scenario where she wasn’t one of the Hillary haters. But after four years of President Trump I bet she’d be ridin’ with Biden, and even if mom never adopted “San Francisco values” I’d like to believe she would be on board with a strong female VP candidate with Bay Area roots, who, like me, was shaped by the single mom who raised her.

Not wearing a watch much nowadays, but I’m acutely aware of time through the tides, which are more ingrained in my daily activities than ever before, and certainly more so than when I lived in landlocked Niger and Mali, where there’s also plenty of sand, but a bigger payoff here where the sand comes with water. And beaches.

Not long after being here I realized that, like some kind of mariner, I had internalized the tides and had an uncanny, almanac-like prescience of the two times a day that it’s low tide. During the first lockdowns of the pandemic, beaches were closed altogether in Costa Rica. When they started lifting the restrictions , even though the beaches were open for 12 hours per week, that still meant the beach was off-limits to me a few days every other week, because it’s not safe to go in or walk at high tide. At high tide the beach meets an embankment and there’s tons and tons of tree trunk-sized driftwood is crashing into the beachhead, threatening to break your ankles or pull you under altogether, which might sound exaggerated but I’ve had first person accounts of both, so I only get on the beach at low tide.

Since I recognized my nascent old (wo)man of the seas tendencies, I’ve had tides on my mind. Not just debut album of the one time it girl, Fiona Apple. It sparked thinking about cliches related to tides, and I thought of an expression that is on frequent rotation on the capitalist playlist “A rising tide lifts all boats.” So that is obliquely what will be explored in this post. In mulling it over in the context of our current times, when the tide is going out not coming in, I also thought of ships being grounded or in distress. And contrary to the old law of the sea, when boats are in trouble, it’s not always women and children first. On the contrary.

Without surrendering my dyed-in-the-wool capitalist bone fides, I submit that a rising tide litfing all boats is a trite euphemism for trickle-down, “voodoo” economics, a staple of the old fiscally conservative GOP playbook (even though I was surprised to learn from Wikipedia that it was JFK who introduced the saying into the lexicon). Also straight out of the World According to Wikipedia, it means “…economic policy, particularly government economic policy, should therefore focus on broad economic efforts.” But by focusing on GDP growth with out driling down to disaggregate by actors in the economy, we lose sight of some glaring inequalities.

Not all boats are built the same. Some are weighted down by heavy anchors, like generations of pervasive economic inequality. Some are rickety and can barely stay afloat, even in calm seas. And irrespective of tides, a boat can be more buoyant when a man is at the helm. Because if a woman’s captaining the ship, she’s most likely getting paid less than a man to do it.

We recently celebrated Black Women Equal Pay Day, a trimester later than Women’s Equal Pay day in the Spring, which is another trimester past men’s earnings. Fun fact: another trimester and we could make a baby, y’all! A baby that a single mom can’t afford to raise but would be stigmatized for availing herself of pitiful social safety net that is inadequate but may be the Plan C that she was left with given that access to family planning is getting harder and harder to come by.

Holly Corbertt in Forbes tells us “Parental status also impacts the wage gap, with Black mothers making just 50 cents to every dollar a white father makes… The pandemic and social unrest about racial injustice have amplified existing inequities in America. ‘Caregiving duties are falling on women across the board, and Black women are more likely to be family breadwinners and also single mothers,’ says Chandra Thomas Whitfield, journalist and podcast host of In The Gap”

Rising tides don’t lift boats that are in a lock system, where men are getting the highest wages, and women are behind the gates and sluices that keep them below, and black women and single moms are trailing even further behind.

I’m horrified by our congress that is acting like survivors on a lifeboat that will be swamped if we provide more assistance. We can’t wait for the tide to come back in, we need to start distributing life vests (extending unemployment benefits) and making more room in the lifeboats (small business stimulus). Shame on them. Shame on us for letting them get away with it.

The point here is that while we capitalists are all patting ourselves on the back for letting the invisible hand of markets have free reign, the incongruous growth in equity markets is doing nothing for the most vulnerable, many of whom are in essential jobs, at risk so that we can keep our pantries stocked and the garbage cans emptied, and living paycheck to paycheck in the best of times…