Posts Tagged ‘gender’

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Woman’s Work

June 17, 2015

New office in new house

Dear Reva,

A day late again, with my apologies. Moving is woman’s work, at least the tedious parts of it (the packing of the innumerable Lego pieces, as opposed to the negotiation of the mortgage), and this woman has been working. Of course, this move was different from past ones, as I did the man’s work too: the mortgage and the lawyers and the insurance and the barbecue hook up.

It turns out that you don’t need a Y-chromosome for those. It also turns out that the woman’s work is harder and takes much longer.

Moving is stressful, but also boring, both to do and to talk about. Stories about moving don’t generate conversation, just other war stories: “You think YOUR handyman took a long time? Mine took four months to assemble an IKEA unit!” As I said, not interesting.

But all of this (Water in the basement! Raccoons on the roof! Wall unit too tall! Furniture too big!) got me thinking about a woman’s work in the context of the modern working couple. I ran into a friend from law school the other day, a litigator at a prestigious firm, who said: “I had to take a week off to attend all of the end of year events for my second grader! Write about that!” Her husband – and perhaps this goes without saying – had not missed an hour at the office.

It is, obviously, the end of the school year, that time when the organizational zeal has leached out of every cell of every mother, and all that is left is a hollow shell of a person who drives up to the front door of the school each morning after the bell, rolling down her window long enough to shout at her child, “RUN!”

When was the last time you checked the homework folder? Or tried to make your kids try a new food for dinner? Or wondered whether or not their shoes still fit? Does your child still have homework, even? Who knows? Who cares? You’ll deal with it when you pack them for camp. After you deal with the raccoons.

And in the meantime, if you a cogent thought in your head, you might wonder why you are the one forgetting to remember all of these womanly tasks. Or remembering to forget them.

Yours,

Kate

Read Reva’s last letter here.

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Turn down the volume!

March 23, 2015
My parents’ kitchen

Dear Reva,

I loved your last letter, which I read at Disney. It provided a few precious moments of serenity (perhaps sanity would be a more accurate word choice there) in a wild week.

You may find this strange, but creativity was on my mind over March Break. Not my own (I’ll get to that), but Big Vision creativity, which is very much on display at Walt Disney World. Love Disney or hate it – I would hold sympathy with either view – but it is impossible to ignore the sheer ambition of the place. I was struck both by the vast scale of the vision, but also the precision of the execution, in what was, not that long ago, a giant swath of Florida swampland. Fascinating, in a once-in-a-lifetime kind of way (hear that, kids?).

How and where do I harness creative ideas? I think this is a wonderful question, and the first answer to it is very much dictated by my life as a mother: however and wherever possible. I won’t say ‘in a perfect world’, because it wouldn’t be a perfect world if I were childless, but in a world where I had fewer domestic responsibilities, I would get my best ideas on long walks, alone, in the morning. I rarely take long walks alone, in the morning or at any other time, so I have to make do.

I was talking to my dad about this question last night. The manuscript for my second book is due in September and I will now become extremely disciplined about my productivity because I never miss deadlines. And so I am trying to figure out how to reduce the noise around me to focus on ‘hearing’ and ‘seeing’ the story I want to tell. I don’t mean literal noise, although that also needs to be managed. I mean the number of things that clamour for my mental attention, pulling my focus away even during times set aside for writing, and drowning out the sound of the characters’ voices.

Take today for instance. On Monday mornings, I have two hours blocked off in my calendar for writing. My house is being sold this week, so I’m living at my parents’ house. In preparation for today’s return to work, I spent yesterday doing laundry, fetching warm clothes and lunch boxes and school uniforms from my house, making a run to the one store in Toronto that makes the bagels that my son eats for his school lunches, and meeting with my lawyer to sign some documents. Organized! Prepared!

And then, at the end of the day, my younger son spiked a high fever which had him up twice in the night and sleeping with me. He slept, I should say. And then he vomited. So this morning, I slept (because I can’t write a coherent word on no sleep) and did more laundry. And now I am racing with the clock to get this letter done before I head out to pick up my older son from school, while my younger son swoons on a nearby sofa and threatens, at twenty-minute intervals, to vomit again. You see? LOUD.

image

I have a wonderful writing mentor who says that he prefers his life to be extremely boring when he is writing a book. I couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately, my life is far from boring right now. But the book is still due in September, and I know I’ll get it done somehow. Working mothers are good at finding a way.

Yes, I know there are some men who are excellent at multi-tasking and who contribute equally to childrearing and domestic labour. I know about these men because people hold them up as examples of the future of marriage, and I hear a lot about them every time a woman complains about gendered inequality within marriage.

I think men are encouraged to focus on work, and women are expected to focus on work and absolutely every other aspect of family life as well, and it is probably to everyone’s detriment, but certainly to women’s.

I suspect that this expectation of women, that we perform flawlessly on all fronts at all times, without any real acknowledgement of the value of our unpaid work, is one of the reasons why we compete so relentlessly with each other. Comparing ourselves with other women is the only way we can evaluate ourselves on the overall picture of our lives – our paid jobs, our volunteer jobs, our parenting, our homes, our bodies, our sex lives, our spouses – and determine our level of success or failure.

And since I don’t think the future of marriage is arriving any time soon, maybe we should try to lighten up on ourselves and each other. THAT would be revolutionary.

Yours,

Kate

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