Author: Jeannine Ouellette

I realized this weekend, with a sense of horror and shame, that I don’t know a damn thing about the world I live in, and I just can’t go on like this. So I did some searching around on the web, and I came across some advice from a soldier in Kandahar who says that if I want to imagine what it is like there, I should put a handful of dirt in my mouth and set myself on fire. I see that breaking out of my cave isn’t going to be easy. After all, my world didn’t shrink overnight. I barely saw it happening.

As a college freshman and an aspiring writer rooming with my sister and taking poetry classes at the U of M with John Engman, I was set on a course of political activism and outreach, even if it was youthfully shallow. I went through a short phase of going to protests with my friend Adam, wearing all black, chain-smoking Marlboro lights, and drinking diet soda by the pitcher. I wore old men’s overcoats scrounged from thrift shops and started dyeing my hair just a little more auburn than it already was. It was exhilarating, but short-lived, because within two years I was engaged, within another year married, and within weeks of the vows, pregnant. Out with the protests and the Marlboros and diet sodas and hair dye, in with the cottage cheese and vitamins.

During that pregnancy, I began working full time in sales management and gained about 60 pounds. Instead of black turtlenecks, I found myself donning floral hand-me-down maternity frocks that I tried and failed to pass off as business attire. I barely recognized myself and wondered if I ever would again.

When my beautiful daughter was born, I experienced a fantastic post-partum elation. I was so overjoyed to have a miraculous, tiny, gray-eyed daughter that those extra 53 pounds still flopping around on my body and the lingering pain of childbirth became almost irrelevant. So did the rest of the world’s problems. My single mission was to shield my daughter from all harm.

Back home from the hospital, my then-husband brought me—along with the standard bouquet—a gift that underscored my joy in the most poignant way imaginable. I found it when I walked into our bedroom, where the open windows let in the comforting aroma of processed oats from the General Mills factory across the street. There, atop my small, scratched wooden dresser sat a 12-pack of Diet Pepsi and a hard-pack of cigarettes.

Gross, yes, but exactly what I needed in the moment: a signal that someone other than me remembered the part of me that was not an Earth mother, not a floral smock. The part of me that had barely invented a grown-up identity before impending motherhood turned me on my head.

I couldn’t actually smoke the cigarettes or drink the poison, because I was breastfeeding, a state of affairs that went on for a total of 10 virtually uninterrupted years and two more children. Eventually, the Earth mother chased off the budding intellectual activist for good.

Or so I thought, until this past weekend, when several small events jolted me out of a thick fog. It started on a Friday afternoon when I left town with my friend after the last day of school for a short getaway in Stillwater. By the time we reached the inn, I was beginning to lose my focus. When I awoke on Saturday morning, utter disorientation had taken over.

At first, I thought it might simply be the horizonless intoxication a teacher feels after passing through that celebrated portal from the school year into the heat of summer. Since my friend and I are both teachers, this theory would add up nicely. But no, I think there’s more at work here. I mean, have you ever had that vaguely bizarre feeling of… not having the foggiest notion of who you are?

You think I’m exaggerating. But I’m not so sure. Because yesterday, after 23 months of uncertain denial, my divorce decree arrived in my mailbox. I—a child of divorce, who spent my whole childhood and young adulthood vowing that if I ever got married, it would be forever—am now officially a single parent, a divorcee, a marriage failure, a head of household in a “broken family.”

And through the fog I holler, so what? Can I imagine stuffing a handful of dirt into my mouth and lighting myself on fire? That’s still the question at hand, and at the moment the answer is no. So I’m going to step out of my cave and start trying.

Jeannine Ouellette is Associate Editor of The Rake.

I’m 12 years old, scooted up to my dad’s octagonal dining table, the backs of my thighs sticking unpleasantly to the vinyl kitchen chair on a sweltering August day. Stepmom Debbie has prepared her specialty, Swedish sausage, a gray tube of meat-like substance that looks a lot like the photo my health teacher Ms. Nick recently displayed of a large intestine. And then there’s the tall glass of two percent milk resting heavily before me, beads of sweat running down its exterior, thick and disgusting white fluid within. Before leaving the table, I will be forced to swallow the milk, all of it, no matter how much I gag in the process. I will have to swallow it because, insists my dad, it’s good for me. Against this truism I, a scrawny kid with chronic earaches and poor appetite, am defenseless.

If only I’d had access then to today’s impressive and growing body of research that threatens our sacrosanct belief in milk as the epitome of wholesome food. Critics now point past the dangers associated with the sins of factory farming— growth hormones, antibiotics, and infectious secretions from unhealthy animals—to the most shattering question of all: whether clean, pure cow’s milk is fit for humans to drink in the first place.

“Ask yourself this question,” coaxes Robert Cohen, author of Milk, The Deadliest Poison, and founder of Notmilk.com, “Does organic human breast milk sound like a delicious drink for an adult human? Instinctively, most people know that there are substances in breast milk that are not intended for their adult bodies. Same goes for pig’s milk and dog’s milk. Same for cow’s milk.”

Seems logical to me, especially when coupled with the real horror stories behind mass production of dairy products. That’s why I tried so hard back in the late 90s to replace dairy in my own and my children’s diets with alternatives, mostly soy based, such as soy milk for pouring on cereal, Tofutti instead of ice cream, and the unpalatable, unmeltable, and dare I say inedible soy cheese products of that era (if they’ve improved, I wouldn’t know, having given up on them for good). Being dairy-free wasn’t easy. After six months of strict veganism, I broke down and bit into a warm, gooey slice of cheese pizza. I haven’t gotten back on the wagon since.

Little did I know that with my foray into dairy alternatives I was buying right into a decade-long marketing campaign to gain consumer acceptance of tofu, soy milk, soy ice cream, soy cheese, soy sausage, and soy derivatives. It coincided with a U.S. Food and Drug Administration decision, announced on October 25, 1999, to allow a health claim for products “low in saturated fat and cholesterol” that contain 6.25 grams of soy protein per serving. Cereals, baked products, convenience food, and other items could now be marketed as promoting cardiovascular health, as long as they contained one teaspoon of soy protein per 100-gram serving.

It was a weak will, not health concerns, that brought me back to Pizza Hut, but given my demonstrated history of swinging with the dairy-soy pendulum, it was probably no coincidence that my personal roundabout dovetailed exactly with the millennial tide turning against soy consumption. As it turned out, shrieked the critics, I—along with the rest of the unsuspecting health-conscious masses—had been bamboozled by the soy industry. Soy protesters began waving fistfuls of anti-soy studies. There are links between soy and fertility problems in certain animals! Soy contains a natural chemical that mimics estrogen, and it alters sexual development! Two glasses of soy milk a day, over the course of a month, contain enough of this chemical to run my menstrual cycle amok! And if that’s not bad enough, soy also promises to disturb my digestion, give me breast cancer, and shrink my brain. Of course, all of this is disputed heatedly by those who claim soy is a healthy, low-cost, versatile food for a new generation, but the debate in itself is enough to turn some consumers back toward the milking pail.

So maybe humans are the only mammals that drink the milk of another mammal. What we drink is hardly the most significant distinction between humans and our animal brethren. So the newest purists believe that raw milk, in its most natural, unadulterated state, is the dairy product most fit for humans. But to get it, they’ve got to form a relationship with an organic farmer willing to bypass wholesalers and market his or her raw, unpasteurized milk directly to consumers.

For years, when my family lived in the country, I bought raw goat milk from a friend down the road, and my children appeared to me just like Heidi and Klara on the Alm, growing strong and rosy on the herb-rich milk of Schwaanli and Baarli. They got used to the thick, salty flavor of the goat milk, and I appreciated the simplicity of it, the fact that we were drinking it practically straight from the goat. It felt right and good, and we only drifted away from it after moving back to the Twin Cities.

Of course I knew raw milk could cause illness, even if I didn’t know that an estimated 100 Americans each year get sick from unpasteurized dairy products, and that some critics claim that figure is far too low since food-borne illness is often misdiagnosed as “flu” or viral illness. Indeed, outbreaks of raw-milk related illnesses occur every year in Minnesota, and in one 1992 incident 50 people got sick after ingesting raw milk at a church picnic. Raw milk can apparently harbor a variety of dangerous micro–organisms including campy-lobacter, salmonella, staphylococci, E. coli, and even rabies. Symptoms can range from mild stomach cramps to coma and death.

It’s a hard world. Risk lurks everywhere. From terrorism to traffic, our lives are at stake with every polluted breath we take. I’m all for eating well, supporting organics, keeping hope alive. But I’ve given up the notion that every sip I allow to pass through my children’s lips is going to make the difference between health and disease. The hysteria, if anything, is bound to make us sick. That harmless looking soybean, that creamy glass of goatmilk that got Klara up on her own two feet, that once-revered carton of two percent in the cooler at the corner store—they’ve got their problems. But are they going to kill you? Probably not (immediately).

Jeannie Ouellette is Associate Editor of The Rake.

“Forget the stereotypes of sugar and spice. Girls are mean…,” begins Amazon.com’s plug for Rosalind Wiseman’s hot new book, Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence, just one of a whole spate of books and articles about surviving the terrors of girlhood. Terrors so fierce that according to Rachel Simpson, author of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, at least one girl in every group interview she conducted for her book admitted to wishing she’d been born a boy, because boys can just fight and “get it over with.”

Girls, say girls themselves, are not only mean, but have an aspect of evil that is not in boys. Girls are sneaky, deceitful, unforgiving, and manipulative. They know how to target your weaknesses and they destroy you from the inside out.
When I look back on my own adolescence, I find I’d rather avert my gaze. After spending seven idyllic years in cozy elementary schools, I experienced Westwood Junior High as a hellish shock. All of us girls despised the way cool boys with their rough, groping hands cornered us between rows of colorful lockers, grabbing at our breasts, at our jeans. Although we were also confused enough to think this attention was flattery, and we hoped it meant the boy of the moment might be about to ask us to “go with him.” But no one is confused enough to be flattered when she is tipped off by fits and howls of laughter that the note she forged for herself to get out of swimming (“Please excuse Jeannine from swimming today because she has her period and she is not allowed to use tampons”) was dropped on the school bus, and found by the worst of the boys. And who really wants to remember the revolving door of belonging to the “right” group of girls? Or, perhaps most dreadful of all, the guilty horror of participating in the shunning of someone else?

The worst case I recall happened to a tall blonde, “Carla,” who was a peripheral member of our “popular” group of girls and boys, but never at the center of the clique. Somehow someone started the rumor that Carla enjoyed putting her curling iron into her vagina. To this day I can see the shape of Carla’s face, the startling blue of her eyes, the lankiness of her thin body in the tight designer jeans of the day. Her image was burned on my brain in the days following the rumor, as she shrank and folded in on herself right before our eyes. We watched silently as she withdrew from us, stopped coming to school, and then appeared briefly escorted by her parents for a meeting with the principal and school counselor. Within a couple of weeks she left Westwood and I never saw her again. I’m ashamed I couldn’t reach out to Carla when she tumbled into the sudden hell of a psychic stoning. I remember acutely what prevented me from rallying for her, and it was the same thing that kept everyone else’s mouth shut, too: the fear—and knowledge—that what happened to Carla was contagious, and that getting too close to the precipice of her personal hell was a sure way to fall in with her.

So I’m no Pollyanna when it comes to girlhood. But I disagree that girls are mean. I would say, rather, that adolescence can be a very mean time, particularly for children warehoused in large, anonymous factory schools with little parental involvement and no safety net. Perhaps it’s not girls who are cruel, but a culture that confines them in environments in which, as Joan Ryan put it in the San Francisco Chronicle last week, they “wander anonymously along a path of least resistance and low expectations,” without the benefit of a positive relationship with even one adult at the school.

As school size increases, so does student alienation, and more than a decade’s worth of studies suggest that students fare better in smaller schools. Mary Anne Raywid, one of the foremost researchers in the field, says the superiority of smaller schools over larger, more impersonal settings has been established “with a clarity and a confidence rare in the annals of education.” Minneapolis, with the help of a $3 million grant from the McKnight Foundation, is transforming seven large high schools into more than 30 “Small Learning Communities,” and St. Paul is exploring a similar restructuring.

This could be great news for girls—and boys. Because in addition to shining the light on the worst of what’s wrong with modern adolescent culture, we have an obligation to ask why this is so and what we can do about it.

This week, as a backdrop to my birthday, winter ended, my two junker cars got towed away for good, my younger daughter learned to ride solo on her two-wheeler, and my neighbor Mike returned from wintering in Mexico. Needless to say, all this has made me eager to travel.

I can’t believe it’s been 18 years since my first getaway to Mexico. I planned it myself, secretly, with an atlas and a phone book, in the weeks before my 16th birthday. When the morning of the big day arrived, I skipped school and hopped an MTC to the Greyhound terminal. I had enough money for a one-way ticket to El Paso and $67 for food and sundries en route. I wore an unattractive light gray Members Only jacket and baggy jeans, and carried a purple tote bag with the word “Ciao!” embroidered on the small label. I had braces on my teeth and a genuinely traumatic hair-do leftover from a perm gone wrong at a discount beauty school.

Nevertheless, I was shedding the stresses of my greasy job at Arby’s, the unwelcome adjustment to my 11th new school in 11 years, and the day-to-day unpleasantries of poverty and social isolation. I was happy to be hitting the road, and almost sick with adrenaline and anticipation as I counted out the bills for bus fare.

Despite sweaty palms and a dry throat, I had the benefit of recent experience with cross-country bus trips. Just before my freshman year of high school, I’d plunked down my summer babysitting cash and left the driving to Greyhound for a ride West from Minnesota to Wyoming to visit my best friend Holly in Casper, where I had lived for six years. That trip had been mostly uneventful, with the exception of a few unusual but harmless seatmates and one jarring snafu in rural Wyoming, when my 14-day bus pass expired earlier than I’d calculated, and a stickler at the transfer station refused to let me back on the bus.

However, my bus fare was hitch-free this time around. It was the whole entering-a-foreign-country thing that had me worried. I had to walk across the border from El Paso to Juárez and figure out, with two years of high-school Spanish and a pocket dictionary, how to traverse the 1,500 miles south to Cuernavaca, where I expected to look up a family for whom I’d babysat regularly before they’d moved away to Mexico.

My first shock came when I tried to ask a pedestrian how to find the train station and he apparently thought I’d asked him to lead me to a hotel. Which he did. By this time I’d been traveling alone by bus for three days and nights, my $67 was dwindling, I was dirty, tired, and losing my sense of adventure. My purple tote bag was growing heavier and heavier under the setting Mexican sun. So, at 16 years and a few days old, 1,500 miles from home, having never seriously taken up any of the usual teenaged pastimes of cigarettes, alcohol, or boys, I followed this Mexican man up the dimly lit staircase of a shabby hotel and collapsed in exhaustion on the pink polyester bedspread. I awoke to the nostril-burning scent of aftershave hovering above me, and when I opened my eyes my travel companion was staring down at me, ready for a kiss.

I lurched out of his way, exclaiming in Spanish and English and every gesture in between that he had gotten the wrong idea. And then I said something I thought he would understand in either language: “I am a Catholic girl!” I wasn’t Catholic, then or now, but the point was well taken, and suddenly this man handed over his wallet, his license, and a stream of earnest apologies and promises that he would do nothing further to offend or harm me. I believed him. Maybe because I could tell he was a good person and meant what he said, or maybe because I was desperate and without a better alternative. Either way, he kept his promises and slept upright in a chair through the night while I lay half awake on the bed. In the morning we ate eggs at a street-side cafe and he walked me to the train station, where he acted as my translator. What he said I don’t know, but somehow he convinced the border patrol to let me on the train with a Dayton’s student charge card as my only I.D.

The train carried me through the Mexican countryside to the city of Chihuahua, where I boarded a bus to Mexico City. From there, finally, I transferred onto the bus that would complete the final leg of my journey to Cuernavaca. By now I’d been on the road about a week, and when I disembarked at the Cuernavaca station, the intensity of my desire to find my American friends was staggering. I found a pay phone and fumbled through my bag for the appropriate foreign coins. I didn’t know their phone number, and suddenly the assumption I’d left home with—of being able to find my friends once I “got to town”—seemed foolish and impossible. I wandered the station in search of a phone book, furiously blinking back tears.

I was afraid to ask for help, since I was pretty sure I’d burst out sobbing and expose my stupidity. I ended up doing both, and to add injury to insult, the friends I had traveled 3,000 miles to see were no longer living in Cuernavaca. I was broke and 16. My attempt to make my way in Cuernavaca failed. The American minister and his wife who gave me shelter didn’t take long to track down my mother and send me back home to all that I’d left behind, including my trusty job at Arby’s.

About a year later, I was working the “window,” and a pretty woman with a soft, southern drawl and two not-so-little-anymore girls drove through ordering Adventure Meals (I’m not making that up, that’s what Arby’s kids’ meals were called then). It was my friend from Cuernavaca. She parked the car and brought her girls into the restaurant; I took my break and we all reminisced. It turned out they’d moved to Guadalajara about a year before I’d come.

I shudder to think of the things that might have happened on that birthday jaunt. Sometimes the thought of that pungent aftershave draws forth a memory so vivid it stops me short. But then again, I’m here to tell the tale, and more importantly, I’ve got a tale to tell. Houses are bought and sold, jobs are gained and lost, the remains of the passing year are turned under every fall and unearthed each spring…and cars, apparently, are towed away with surprising regularity. But our adventures are beyond all that. Our adventures are inspired—breathed in to transform us, breathed out again as the people we’ve now become.

Jeannine Ouellette is a Minneapolis writer and teacher who loves steep hills and hardy shrub roses.

Since entering into a hellish and utterly surreal divorce almost two years ago (for starters, think accusations of adultery and public humiliation, job threats, slashed tires, rumor-mongering, a bitter and protracted custody dispute, an order for protection when things got really scary, $40,000 in legal fees on a teaching salary of $30,000, and a small, intimate fishbowl community where I teach and where my three children attend school and where I have brazenly carried on to this day in a love relationship that wasn’t adultery but wasn’t politic, either, with a teacher who used to be my son’s teacher and who also used to be married to my daughter’s teacher and who has three children of his own in this fishbowl school whose murky waters he has since left and in which I still swim) I’ve taken up the habit of thinking in captions.

My mind floats slightly above the scene in which I see myself, just the way people describe near-death experiences (or delusory mental illness, I suppose). My mind coolly surveys the situation, casting off pithy one-liners. For instance, there I lie on the couch, mail unopened, phone unanswered, mind untamed, alternately sobbing wretchedly and staring vacantly into space. Caption: “Had Good Life, Wrecked It.”

Or I watch myself jump at the sound of the front door, my face lights up as I run to greet my love, he sets down his bag and puts his arms around me for as long as I want. Caption: “I Can’t Believe I Found Him” or “Love is Worth It.” What about the kids, though? There my mind becomes relentless with its incessant captioning. Scenes: Youngest daughter sobbing and kicking when picked up by her dad, or me holding my son who is weeping because he misses the old days when his parents were married. Identical captions: “Selfish Mother Destroys Children’s Lives.”

In another scene, I’m going into stress palpitations on the night before an important observation and review at my job as a second-grade Waldorf teacher. My oldest daughter, 11, is helping me select a story to include in this important lesson plan, and she’s sitting on the couch beside me, reading something from a favorite anthology. Our bare feet are softly touching. Her hair glows around her face, backlit by the table lamp beside her. She is lovely. Caption: “Happy, Healthy Daughter With Loving Mother—Whom She Loves More Than Ever No Matter What You Think You Self-Righteous Assholes.”

Funny how the captions, emerging unbidden (and sometimes unwanted) from my subconscious are a barometer of my emotional landscape, revealing the intermittent hostility, the terror, the hysteria, and the inexplicable joy despite it all. Joy? Yes, oddly, more than you could imagine. For as much as I have suffered and wailed and stared, I have also never laughed so hard or so often as in these past twenty months. I have discovered that what James Baldwin says is true: “One discovers the light in darkness. That is what darkness is for. And what the light illuminates is danger, and what it demands is faith . . . ”
So the darkness has shown me the light, the pain makes possible the pleasure. Where once I was numb I am now skinned alive, and while raw flesh is vulnerable to excruciating pain, it is also apparently ticklish and amazingly sensitive to the slightest comforts. I am tinglingly alive and dangerously exposed. I’m naked tied to a post in a parking lot. It’s miserable when its hailing and I’ve got some frostbite scars, but there are these moments when the sun is clear and mild and the breeze is tender and carries the scent of new grass. There are these moments that I remember my humanity, and it is sublime.

Scene: Me in January, gloriously warm winter sun shining down as I walk to the corner coffee shop. It’s been a beautiful morning in the classroom among children I love, and it is a stunning afternoon outside. I walk alone down Nicollet Avenue; two young men in their sagging jeans and windbreakers pass by and whisper, “Pretty lady.” I smile at them, distracted for a moment from the paralysis of my upcoming divorce trial. A beam of light shoots down from heaven and nearly blinds me. Caption: “God Makes Winter Day Especially Bright For Young Woman as Consolation For Her Troubles” or “Later this Girl Will Drive With Windows Down and Sing Along to Love Songs.”

This terse captioning is unlike me and yet it is comforting. I have come to understand that my captions are my means of deconstructing judgment and giving up on defense. Life is much too complicated to explain anyway, so why try? I’ve come to prefer seeing each detail as a perfect reflection of the ever-emerging whole.

Take this scene: Me with my beloved getting hugged and hugged and hugged until I think I will die of happiness, and surrounding us are his three children and my three children, my little daughter adoring his middle daughter, his older daughter bringing her boyfriend over to hang out, my son looking up to his son, both embroiled in love and jealousy and the newfound thrill and agony of potential brotherhood, all of them giving something to the vision, all of them demanding, accepting, rejecting, baking creampuffs in September, sharing Christmas in December, throwing tantrums in January, chasing away shadows in February. Caption: “Maybe Selfish Tramp Mother Has Not Ruined Their Lives After All” or “Find and Circle the Two Crazy People.” Scene: Me, paying and mailing bills, holding down my jobs, meeting my deadlines, borrowing money, not from a bank, but from a couple of angels posing as human beings stepping in to help me when I desperately need it. Caption: “She is Lucky and She Knows It” or “She Brings Home the Bacon But Doesn’t Eat it Because She is a Vegetarian and That’s Why She Keeps Losing Weight.”

Or maybe it’s time to graduate from captions and simply write a pull-quote for the whole montage: “Look, She’s a Mother, a Teacher, a Writer, Making a Life, Picking Through Rubble, Finding Agates and Putting them into Her Children’s Pockets, Carrying On, Becoming Real, Dreaming Everything, Expecting Nothing, Letting Go, Being Water, Believing Love, Relinquishing Everything, Practicing Faith. The End. The Beginning.”