The Yale Review

175 will tell you things about myself, quite a lot of things, not because I think they are particularly interesting or worth knowing, but because so many women, cis and trans, don’t get to choose what to reveal and what to conceal about themselves in public. Their race, class, sexuality, forms of embodiedness, relationships with gender and religion are hyper-visible wherever they go. The most intimate parts of their family’s histories are trapped humiliatingly in official records and public archives, they are read like quote-unquote “open books” by those who merely pass them by on the way somewhere else, they are judged in under a minute, stared at for hours, touched, congratulated for their “bravery” in essay Wildness The willingness to be defeated Maria Tumarkin I 176 | MARIA TUMARKIN being themselves, their parenting is scrutinized, they cannot say, as I have every intention of saying: “I am here to represent myself through my ideas.” I am a cis-woman, Jewish, white, hetero, a breastfeeding mother at present despite turning forty-six this year. My daughter is twenty-three. Her two brothers are thirteen and one. Out of my quarter of a century as a parent, about half was spent as a single mother. I am now in the first properly good relationship of my life. We are first-generation migrants to Australia. I was fifteen when we took a plane to Melbourne—a plane, not a boat. During my first year in Australia, I wore secondhand black as a form of mourning. An ungrateful migrant. My engineer mum cleaned houses of rich women for us to get by. I never finished an Australian school. At the beginning, I was itching to get out and did have some far-reaching escape-Australia plans, but those were thwarted by my first pregnancy . Thirty years later, I have settled, more or less, which is to say more or less uneasily, into being a settler Australian. I have no religion at birth or acquired. I will rent for the rest of my life. I have thought about money every day for most of my adult life with a heavy, pulling feeling sometimes in the gut, sometimes in the chest. I am what is considered “middle class.” I have been financially okay only since turning forty and only because of a job at a university , where I teach in the creative writing program. Academic jobs below the associate professor level are designed to feel precarious. I don’t know what it’s like at the top of the pyramid, but I can tell you that my recent financial okayness is infused with anxiety and a feeling of complicity, particularly because I am surrounded by brilliant people, mostly but not exclusively women, who work semester to semester and who are chronically exploited and underpaid and, worse still, whose brilliance is often perceived as a hindrance to the institution that half-heartedly half-employs them. Everyone knows what’s going on, and this collective knowledge makes little difference to the way things are. Their precarity is more precarious than mine, even if this isn’t a dick-measuring contest. WILDNESS | 177 My partner took care of our son while I wrote this piece. We were helped by my auntie, who was born in 1937, and my mum, who was born in 1941. Until this year I had never paid another woman to look after my children or to clean my house, but this is because I have had my auntie and my mum helping me for twentythree years and because I keep my house unclean. This year a young woman we love comes to look after Nico twice a week. I have never, until now, written or spoken about feminism. Have never wanted to write or speak about feminism. As my guilty pleasure, I watch, while cooking and cleaning, a Russian dating show called Let’s Get Married. I have no interest in marriage, except when it is denied to people for whom it is important, and I loathe the politics of this show, in which the word feminism is used as a joking reprimand at best and a synonym for the mass...