Chapter One: Born a Female Townie (page 3)

… and although my mother wasn’t a hippie per se, she did belong to a consciousness raising group that would continue to meet nearly 50 years later. Her first choice for a name for me was Zinaida (Zina for short), after Zinaida Gippius, a 19th century Russian poet. Mom actually named a cat after me before I was conceived so she did get to use the name even though my father nixed the idea of saddling his first born with something so foreign. He wanted to name me Melody or Melanie which my mother could not abide, so they settled on Sonya, after Dostoyevsky’s Sonya from Crime and Punishment. 

Mom studied Russsian language, literature and culture in college and it stayed with her. To this day she can recall the Russian for words such as cucumber and use it with her Russian esthetician during a facial.

I was conceived the night my father successfully defended his Ph.D. Dissertation in paleontology at the University of Michigan, where my mother had already graduated with a Bachelor’s in English literature. I was born nine months later at Women’s Hospital in Ann Arbor. They were already married, my conception was intentional, and I became the first grandchild on both sides (a gig I highly recommend if you can get it). I have always felt very much wanted in this world, very much like I belonged. I think the charmed circumstances surrounding my birth contribute to this sense of entitlement. It’s something I wish for everyone.

I was not, however, perfect to every set of eyes. When one of my mother’s brothers came to see her after she’d delivered me, he brought a pale yellow layette and a proclamation: “You had the first child, but I’ll have the first boy.” I definitely “got that message” growing up in my extended family. But instead of internalizing it in a negative way, I made it my battle cry. It’s a part of what pushed me to explore Women’s Studies in college, and from there to have a profound impact on my worldview. But more on that later.

Twenty-one months after I was born my parents presented me with a brother with a similarly Russian-themed name and shortly thereafter we moved from North Carolina, where my father taught for one year at a private boy’s school, to Virginia. It was there that I spent the next ten years of my life and…

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Pages from my autobiography