Weren’t you, when you were young, the best at something? Always the first to turn in assignments, the fastest runner, the talented one, or most likely, due to the nature of this site, the smart one?
In grade school I was gifted; one of a small group of kids pulled from regular classes to do advanced coursework and brainy projects. In high school I was cool; one of a handful of the creative rebellious. In college I was focused, had a four-point, set the curve. I was one of twenty in my major. Professionally, I expected the job, the praise, and the raises. I was one of one, teaching in the classroom. As a stay-at-home mom, it has all come crashing down.
I am now, finally, one of six and a half billion.
Before you start gasping at my vanity, let me assure you that the world of developmental psychology says this is normal. It’s part of growing up, finding yourself other than where you planned to be. My father says life is a series of downward adjustments to your expectations.
For Mensans, though, maybe it’s less necessary. Maybe there are lots of you who got on top and stayed there. But for those of us who were used to even a little bit of stardom, and then had it taken away for one reason or another, the absence is glaring.
Lisa: [panting] Grade me...look at me...evaluate and rank me! Oh, I'm good, good, good, and oh so smart! Grade me!
[Marge scribbles an A on a piece of paper]
[Lisa walks off, muttering crazily and sighing]
Simpsons Episode 2F19 "The PTA Disbands"
I am good at what I do now. I am competent in my different roles: mom, wife, daughter, sister, friend, part-time community activist. But the reinforcements are so few. Some will say I should be pleased enough with affection and thanks. But I miss the rewards, the kudos, being the one who knows the answers. There’s no annual review in motherhood, and I wouldn’t want one; but there’s also no denying that this can be the least gratifying work, least appreciated, and often the most mind numbing.
Having said that, I must add I wouldn’t give it up for all the world. I don’t want all the world, or even the little bit of it that used to lavish me with praise, to the point where I took it for granted. I have more here and now than most people who ever lived, or who are alive now. I have security and comfort, love, affection, and companionship.
I don’t want fame or need strangers to know who I am. I just need a wee bit of recognition for this invisible work that I do—because I am used to getting it; because I was not taught that these things are my duty; because I do not believe in enduring in silence; because I’ve made hard choices and given up both easier and more difficult paths to do this; because I do not want to disappear, erased by my beautiful, happy son and my good-natured, talented husband. But mostly, probably, because I was used to it.
“Sit down I said. The eggs are cold already.”
From "And Face the Day" by Diane DiPrima
This is old, Betty Freidan and The Feminine Mystique kind of old. Vacuuming does not fulfill. But this is different. I don’t vacuum.
Really, in my case, this is Diane DiPrima’s Dinners and Nightmares kind of old. I’m not trying to uphold the status quo, be the good little homemaker, make life comfortable for my man. Nor am I stomping out a new path. It’s been done before. The bohemians tried it, then the beatniks, and then the hippies: for as long as there has been a middle class, there have been women rejecting its constraints. Like those before me, what I really want is to reclaim what the dominant Weltanschauung would take: my health, my pace, my family, community, the outdoors, creativity, my own thoughts.
It is not a glamorous life. In fact, this life is purposefully grubby at times. And slow, when the world is saying hurry up, be first, or you will be left behind. No, not glamorous or charming, not magical — real, grounded, lovely.
Reasonable Expectations
So no, Ms. Women’s Studies professor at important university, I will not throw my life into the fight for women’s right to compete in the hyper-capitalist professions; although, I see no reason why women shouldn’t be expected to mangle things just as much as men. Oxytocin and the rest of the snuggle hormones are hardly strong enough to combat 500 daily provocations to greed, speed, and ego-angst. (500 — that’s an extremely conservative estimate of how many advertising messages the average person sees in one day. The more common estimate is 3000.)
I do not mean to say that all women in the workforce are hyper-capitalists. Of course, of the 68 million women in the U.S. who work, most are in jobs that are necessary, good, and important, often at a lower wage than they deserve, often at some expense to themselves and their families. This one Ms. Women’s Studies professor’s argument was that those among us born into the means to do so have the responsibility to represent women in the upper echelons of paid work. In other words, we owe it to all women to become well-respected professionals and to fight from that position for greater equality. I do agree that my economic position, my education, and my good fortune leave me in a position of responsibility. But I am not responsible for perpetuating a faulty system. Instead I will wage my own battle in the war for reasonable expectations.
We’ve been extracting oil like mad for a century. We’ve based our entire economy on it. Evidence strongly suggests it is reasonable to expect we will deplete our available oil resources in the next forty years.
The average savings per family in 2005 was -0.5%. It is reasonable to expect social security to tank, debt to increase, and for our generation to view retirement as a luxury available to only the wealthiest of individuals.
Big agriculture has been messing with the food supply, testing cross-species genetic mutations in open fields and in the marketplace. It is reasonable to expect weeds, insects, and our own cells to mutate accordingly. Weeds have already started.
Of the six and a half billion people on the planet, half live on the equivalent of less than two dollars a day, while 20% of the world’s population consumes 86% of the world’s goods. It is reasonable to expect revolt.
These and other problems would be impossible without our culture of consumerism and the behemoth corporations from which it spawns. It is reasonable to expect to take responsibility.
Emerson
The same man who once said “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know,” also said, “Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.” Tomorrow I may see things differently. But today I am resolved that the way out of the jungle starts with raising my head and looking around, getting a feel for the terrain. I can’t do that if I’m tangled in workaday vines. I can do it if I clear some space to think through what my kid will need to know to face the future and what I can do now, here, to make good.
So what if I get a little bored and frustrated every once in a while? So what if this one little life gets overlooked by most of the other little lives? At least this life is my own. At least I choose my own compromises. At least I know my battle to be as worthwhile as it can be. At least for long stretches at a time I am content, peaceful. And when those stretches end, I have purpose.
Resources
DiPrima, Diane. Dinners and Nightmares. New York; Corinth, 1974.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance.” (1841/1847) The Heath Anthology of American Literature Vol. 1. Paul Lauter Ed. Lexington, MA; D.C. Heath and Company, 1990.
Heinberg, Richard. The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies. Gabriola Island, B.C.; New Society Publishers, 2003.
Hirshman, Linda. “America’s Stay-at-Home Feminists.” The American Prospect. 24 November 2005. http://www.alternet.org/story/28621/
Kimbrell, Andrew Ed. Fatal Harvest: the Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture. Washington D.C.; Island Press, 2002.
Nickolson, Virginia. Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939. New York; HarperCollins, 2002.
Amy Vaughn
Copyright © 2006 Amy Vaughn.
