Ceilings

My neck hurts. I spent the summer straining it, gaze lifted, looking up to remarkable women reaching high, looking up at dreams and possibilities, and at ceilings.

First, there was the mesmerizing honeycomb ceiling of Beijing’s Water Cube, and beneath it, the Olympian swimmer Dara Torres. The lanky, 41-year-old muscular mermaid was my August infatuation. While NBC’s cameras couldn’t get enough of Michael Phelps, I was honed in on Torres, the always-smiling mature mama counterpart to Phelps’ boy wonder celebrity. Like Torres, I am a swimmer; I understand the lure of the lane-lines, the rhythmic release that comes from lap after lap of freestyle, and I, too, am a post-40-something mom (though with five more years, two more kids and significantly more body fat than she has). I know the ache of fatigue as I drag out of bed to swim in the pre-dawn dark, and I know the sanctity of submersion—the hushed, sloshy reprieve of the pool, where demands of family and work get briefly washed away.

Unlike Torres, however, speed is not my strong suit, and so I was in awe of her commanding strokes, of her racing prowess, of how she meshed grace with power to blow past athletes half her age. “Go mama, go mama,” I cheered as she poured it on heading into the finish, then held my breath as she touched the wall a miniscule one-hundredth of a second behind the gold medalist. And I watched as Torres looked up at the beautiful, translucent bubble-wrappish ceiling above her, rolled her eyes ever so slightly, and smiled as she warmly congratulated the winner. “Hell yeah,” her smile seemed to say. “I did what I came to do; I proved that middle-aged moms are a force to reckon with. I swam damn hard and fast.”

Torres shattered an Olympic ceiling—at age 33 in Sydney, she had already become the oldest U.S. swimming gold medalist, and eight years later in Beijing she became the oldest Olympic swimming medalist in history, as well as the only swimmer ever to medal in five Olympic games. That’s 20 years of Olympic-level training and competition, that’s a lot of laps. No wonder the Water Cube ceiling seemed to glow. But then, in what seemed like another mere hundredth of a second, the Olympics were over and we were back to that other grueling race, this one, too, about national pride and fierce competition. Only with the presidential race, the ceiling is higher, the overhead more costly.

Hillary, like Dara Torres, raced like a well-trained champion athlete. Throughout the long-fought primary, she demonstrated her speedy wit, agile intellect and staggering physical and mental stamina, but ultimately finished with the Silver while Obama claimed the Gold. Hillary received no medal on the final podium, but instead looked up proudly at “Eighteen million cracks in the glass ceiling,” and with that consolation, I believe all women everywhere, regardless of political leaning, basked in a brighter glow underneath that ceiling because of the light now refracting through it.

And then comes Sarah Palin. More accurately, then comes McCain, who taps Palin on the shoulder and invites Alaska’s quickie governor for a dance. She says “Yes sir,” and adds with a nod to Hillary that the “women of America aren’t finished yet, that we can shatter that glass ceiling.” Well, that’s one thing I agree with Palin on. Yes, we can shatter it, and we will, and we are, but not because Palin answers McCain’s Match.com query for conservative arm candy. This was more like cramming her foot in a glass slipper than the gritty work of busting through a glass ceiling.

In the interest of full disclosure (something Palin might have considered), I can’t say that I’ve ever bumped my head on a glass ceiling. My feminism is rooted in my belief in basic, bottom-line justice, not personal experience of betrayal or belittlement because of my gender. I’m an at-home mom and a freelance writer, dependent on the cushion of my husband’s salary—not exactly the poster girl for ceiling shattering. But I’m raising three daughters to have the confidence and faith that their dreams are not limited by chromosomes and the assurance that they’ll rise or fall based on their hard work and personal accomplishments, not their gender. Which is why McCain naming a token woman to appease the religious right and seduce Hillary supporters riles me so. Dara Torres put her training time in; Hillary certainly paid her dues. While Palin may well have polished up the PTA and the piddly Wasilla City Council, her veep nod does not shatter the glass ceiling, it obscures it. It turns it into a popcorn ceiling, like the dreadful eight foot high cottage cheesey ones in my 1970s-era house, the ones I finally had scraped smooth and painted when we renovated a few years back. Popcorn ceilings are the quick, easy and cheap way to get a finished look and deaden acoustics while you’re at it (i.e., just what the McCain campaign needed), never mind the toxic asbestos and tacky stalactite aesthetics.

Pardon me, boys, but I believe in a woman’s right to choose, and I choose a glass ceiling over a popcorn one anytime. At least you can see beyond it and reach toward light in the distance, light that now shines through a bright and promising eighteen-million-prong prism. Glass shards are getting under my skin. It’s time to get cracking.

Stephanie Hunt’s essays, features and profiles appear in numerous publications. To help further crack the ceiling, she is donating her earnings from this essay (and others) to the incredibly well-qualified woman currently running for U.S. Congress in her district.

~Stephanie Hunt