Monthly Archives: June 2009

I Have It All

Posted on by Ann

They say a woman’s life had three stages: Maiden, Earth Mother and Crone. But there is a fourth stage. It’s called “having it all”. It cannot be achieved by Maidens. The very term implies immaturity and want of mettle testing. No, “having it all” is somewhere after maturation and before death which leaves a gal with an awful lot of time to achieve this lofty, and in my opinion, utterly valueless state of being.

A blogger asked her audience the other day to define what “having it all” meant to them without going to the mattresses and this was my response:

I had the “career” and the kid and hated it. And this was before my husband died. Hated it a lot more afterward because it stopped being my choice and became a matter of survival.

Do I have it all now? I don’t have the writing career I want – yet – but I am much happier without the “career” though I do miss the business casual a tiny bit every so often. But my new “uniform” is more me and I am more me than I have ever been in my life.

When I was in university, it was forbidden to want the husband, kids unless you were willing to put on the business casual and arm wrestle with the world as well. That was the “having it all” definition my peers and I were handed by the 2nd Gen Fems, our big Boomer sisters. And I always felt we got royally shafted because there was never a choice for us. We couldn’t do it as our mothers did (and not all our mothers suffered from the problem that had no name). We had to be working moms and super sex kitten wives.

And I am hardly the kind of person who defines myself via my husband and child. I usually tell people I am a writer before I mention the wife and mother part. I am a lot of really great things and I happen to be married to a terrific guy and have really awesome daughters.

Can you have it all? I guess that depends on what your “all” is.

Technically speaking, I have it all now. The husband, the child, the career of my heart and a lifestyle that suits me to a tee. But it’s that pesky “eye of the beholder” thing because as a woman who gave up a secure day job and an independent income to remarry, relocate and become a financially dependent home fire tender and child wench – I have let go of the last rung and am viewed as “kept” to the point that anything I might see myself as having achieved before doesn’t count.

The built-in vac wasn’t working today, so I mentioned it to Rob when he called to let me know he was on his way home from town. He’d removed the outlet upstairs when he was painting and that was the problem.

Later when I mentioned I felt sometimes that I was losing my ability to trouble shoot, he asked,

“What would you have done in Des Moines?”

“Called a repairman if it wasn’t an obvious problem.”

“See, you know what to do.”

“Yes, but I feel like a Panda who can’t be put back into the wild.”

I have a husband to take care of me now. Somehow that infantilizes me because the whole “having it all” thing has permeated society to the point where women who can choose aren’t supposed to do so. It’s a betrayal of the sisterhood. The fact that I am happy too just makes it an insult to choiceless women’s injuries on top of it.

Jessica, in her original post, doesn’t apologize for being someone’s wife, not having a career outside her home and for really loving her life. It brought back memories of university where I just sat mute while my girlfriends denigrated those peers who wanted nothing more than to get a degree they could use later on – after they’d stayed home with the babies they naively assumed they’d be able to have while the husband, they were sure they would snag, provided for them all*. Even though I knew deep down I was no where near full baked as a person for marriage, I didn’t think it was a bad dream. It matched my role model of the era. No, not my mother, but Mary Alice – the woman whose children I babysat for.

I was thinking about her the other night after I paid our new sitter and was telling her about getting a phone call in the middle of dinner from my sister. DNOS was at a wedding reception and wanted to know how to stick a spoon to her nose. It was a trick Mom had seen at Rob and my wedding dinner and she couldn’t remember how to do it. Kee, our sitter, laughed and although, she is mute with Rob, she chats up a storm when it is just she and I.

I was like that with Mary Alice. Only probably more rapt. Because she was who I wanted to be when I grew up. Beautiful, funny, smart, married to someone whom she loved and who put her and their marriage even before the kids. She was a stay at home, and as far as I know never went back to the workforce though she’d worked a bit between college and the birth of their first child. I saw her last fall at my Dad’s wake. She was the same as I remembered her.

And I don’t recall her being helpless. She managed four children without major incident. I know she kept the books. I am fairly certain she didn’t marry her husband for his handiness because I can’t recall him doing much more than mowing the lawn. Marriage didn’t seem to keep her from her passions or hamper her independence.

Based on Mary Alice, I concluded at fourteen that marriage was not an awful thing if you found the right person.

I went off to school at 18. I worked my way through college. I went from there straight to my first teaching assignment hundreds of miles from my hometown where I didn’t know a soul and every time that I moved – which I did just about every year – I did it all myself. I fielded car issues and minor maintenance. I eventually bought a house on my own. Minus the man and child, I technically had it all and a bag of chips by 33.

The thing about marriage that I have noticed is that it seems to demagnetize women in the eyes of the world at large. Every accomplishment of my own fell off my resume. I’d bought and paid for two cars before meeting Will but when we went to buy a vehicle together, I was ignored. When we bought our first house together – using the money from the sale of mine as a down payment – he got to sign the papers first. When I asked why I was told,

“The man’s signature is always on top.”

Some people assume that I married Rob because I couldn’t handle life on my own. Singleness was too much for me. I’ll cop to being tired, but who wouldn’t have been? I had a full-time teaching position where I dealt with kids who ranged from criminal to really emotionally damaged. I had a pre-schooler I had parented solo since her first day. I was in graduate school for all of Will’s illness and half a year after he died. I had a house to keep up. I had me to attend to and was battling stomach issues that seemed to defy my doctor’s ability to diagnose. But I did it all. I spent a weekend chopping wood after trimming branches off trees. I did the landscaping before putting the house up for sale. And, yeah, that was me in the basement hauling boxes to higher ground and trying to fix the sump pump (my quick fix held for while) during the heavy flooding that spring.

So I guess here is the question. When in my adult life haven’t I had it all? If husband and child are add-on’s – and I think they are in a sense – at every stage of my life, barring crone because I don’t think I am quite there yet, I have had it all simply because I was fine. I was “touring the facility and picking up slack”.

And who the hell doesn’t do this? And what does it really have to do with “having it all”?

Perhaps “all” is relative.

 

*In the early 80′s the latter was still a relatively safe assumption.

White Trash Neighbors

Posted on by Ann

Since setting the Mounties upon Guitar Hero and his wife, the white trash renters to our north have not been an issue. For the most part we so seldom saw them that Rob didn’t realize she worked at his plant and their recent newborn addition was a surprise to us.

But with the new spawn came unexpected emergence from their four-walls and a roof cocoon and they took to sitting on the front porch with their toddler for smoke breaks. The owners of the house are militant about smoking indoors and apparently Mama Hero, having done her duty with two children under the age of two, is now able to indulge in what appears to be quite the addiction.

I think smoking is the ultimate dummy tax from a financial perspective as well as a health stance, but the thing about smoking that really bugs me is that I don’t want to and yet I do by virtue of living around smokers who don’t want smoke in their own homes but think nothing of blowing it into mine.

Our front windows are open all the time during the summer to aid the circulation and keep the house cool. Like most people here, we don’t have central air. It really is an unnecessary expense. The neighbors’ second hand smoke snakes in and fills the lower level of the house and so windows must be closed. Not a big deal? Well, some people are more philosophical about this than I am, but it’s not just a smelly annoyance for me. It aggravates allergies and kicks up my asthma and both have long ranging consequences in terms of reduced ability to exercise and increased need of medication.

I have done nothing but endure smoking neighbors. Creepy Neighbor smoked and I was forced to keep windows closed pretty much all the time in the warm weather. He was a chain smoker. I seldom saw him without a cigarette in hand. The house before that I had to contend with Will smoking. Yeah, irony, but my afflictions worsened considerably with the stress of caring for him and the single working mom gig. Will, to his credit, quit. He promised me he would and he did. His illness however was already in play and he had lapses that he blamed on the hypnotist he saw,

“I think that guy did something to my brain,” he would say.

The apartments I lived in always had at least one smoker who had to sit upwind when puffing but ironically, I had less trouble with smokers when I was in university than I had at any point in my life despite the fact that this was pre-anti smoking era, smokers were a lot more considerate and it seemed, to me, that fewer people smoked.

The Hero family moved this past weekend. Loaded up Clampett style and are gone. The last time the house vacated it was empty most of the summer. Let’s hope for a similarly ghost-like situation. Rentals out here seem to be sitting empty longer now that housing prices have fallen a tad and the upgrader projects are stalled. We’ll breathe easier for a while.

Tango Monday Meme

Posted on by Ann

What is it about old school dancing? Waltzing. The Tango. Even those 16th and 17th century precursors to line dancing. They put to shame the kind of dancing I grew up with (my forced P.E. excursion into square dancing excepted).

The first dances I attended were as a ninth and tenth grader in the school café. Loud pop and hair band ballads meant that dancing was bouncing and twisting in a gaggle of girlfriends or watching couples lean against each other. Where was the elegance, the intent, the exchange of information a person needs in the pairing game on the ark of  life?

I was reminded again of my woeful lack of skills Saturday night when Rob and I slipped into the city for yet another celebratory dinner and a movie. The film was an English one, Easy Virtue, based – loosely would be my guess – on the Noel Coward play of which there is a silent film adaption by Alfred Hitchcock no less.

Like most films that originate over the water without much interest in American audiences, the accent and speech patterns took a while to get used to and we missed a few jokes in the beginning. I adore English humor. It’s caustic. Corrosive and wicked, in a way I dream of being able to emulate someday.

The story is set in the late 1920′s but still pre-crash and involved the sudden marriage of an English country blue-blood to an older American woman who drove on the European racing circuit. Scandalous. His mother and sisters are horrified while his WWI shattered father merely smiles and cracks witty at the expense of all.

At different points her past becomes clearer (yeah, that old widow thing rears its predictable head) and she realizes that her love for her young husband cannot overcome the obstacles of his family and position and she decides to give him up for his own good. It’s Christmas and there is a dance taking place. And she tangos her defiance.

“A woman shouldn’t really dance like that with her father-in-law,” I whispered to Rob, who later brought up the valid point that having never had a living father-in-law myself, my observation was an interesting one.

Plot points in dance. Character motivation and intent revealed. It reminded me of Niles and Daphne on Frasier. Another favorite.

I only rarely slow danced. Not because I wasn’t asked, but I didn’t want to be that close to someone. There is nothing innocent about full body physical contact with another. The intimacy is suggested and as the dance continues it becomes more than just an invitation.

I am curious about others’ experience or perceptions. Leave a comment or link back.