When we watch old movies you see “simpler times,”
When “men were men, and women were women,”
But I point out to you that for women to be women then;
It wasn’t much of a “choice.”
It wasn’t that they weren’t totally themselves,
but that what they could be was so much more.
Not to be allowed to be, or to even explore how to be meant something:
that there were real consequences when you didn’t fit the ideal.
But you insisted that everybody (That is, men too) faced these limits.
And that men were also stuck in rotten jobs they didn’t choose.
You stated that it seemed like such an easy deal to be a housewife:
to be financially supported by a husband, and to live a domesticated life,
just doing chores, an unwaged, often undervalued, taken-for-granted kind of work.
You even took a dig at my politics: Isn’t that what you Marxists want? Uncommodified Work?
You got upset when I asked you whether you thought that there was no reason for things to change
And whether you believed there was no injustice women faced in that world;
so that women needed to be the women they wanted to be,
and not the women a male dominated world required or imagined them to be.
You got upset just like the time I cleaned the washroom for the nth time;
Or that time I washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen for the nth time;
Or the time I washed the sheets for the nth time;
You made it all seem that it was my plan to make you out to be a sexist male:
Someone who didn’t do his share of the housework – the chores you promised you would do.
I usually try to calm you down and to tell you the reason I did the work was because:
I wanted to have a bath in a clean washroom;
I needed to get off some steam and take a break from my work and my writing;
I just wanted to get rid of the water that collects in the corners our countertop.
You usually bring up the fact that the teenager around the house, doesn’t do as much as we do.
You don’t really need to remind me because I do live out that conflict everyday.
When either of you, drop the ball, I do pick up the slack. I always do even if nobody notices.
I do try to get her to do more and the truth is, she does do more than the average Canadian teen does.
Fact is, she does it all while getting straight As, so understand me when I say that --
Her housekeeping abilities are not at the top of the list of my problems at this point.
In fact before she left, she did a big laundry job, but she ended up re-washing clean clothes.
It’s no wonder, really. Like me, she was multi-tasking too.
The truth is, the aggravation I get because of doing the work,
and having to worry about hurting your feelings
can be infinitely more stressful than doing the actual chores by myself, for myself.
Managing emotions – both others’ and mine, and being expected to display the appropriate ones is
just TOO MUCH WORK.
