Breadwinner Territory

A shift to “working mom”

“I will not do the patriarchy’s dirty work,” I tell myself. A mantra of sorts. Except I have. I do. There’s often been no way around the engulfment of it.

Things get lost in the struggle of sleepless nights raising little children, navigating marriage to someone with ADHD, and recovering from and working with the fallout of endometriosis, a long-misdiagnosed women’s health condition that wreaked havoc in my life. But it is heavy just being a woman in the USA, where we have learned that all the leading ladies in our favorite movies got sexually assaulted in casting rooms or on set, and we still don’t have full rights, with even less than we used to in certain states. There is still no paid parental leave to care for the babies we might choose or get forced to have.

In the midst of it all, I feel so bogged down. I spent too much time over a pandemic in a small house that other people have cluttered and not helped unclutter, and I have no creativity or oomph left for it. My body has softened into dough while my impatience has risen.

Gardening is no longer enough. I go out in it to see a half-eaten sandwich that someone has thrown in it. Someone made them that sandwich. Now someone else, apparently me, will have to pick it up and throw it away.

I need some kind of raw and abrupt change. I want economic power.

I could see long before this surprise third baby that stay at home motherhood didn’t fit me well. I bought a blazer and some cute office shoes, started interviewing, but then gave up a little as the economy in my field turned, the wind didn’t seem to be blowing my way, and my belly got rounder.

All the home projects I wanted to hire an actual handyman for got left to an accounting clerk who will impulsively begin a 13th project rather than manage an unfinished 12th one.

All the items and plans I wanted to budget for were left behind for groceries and utility bills, or arguments over fast food splurges and interest-laden debt.

I could feel myself becoming less and less of who I wanted to be with each burdensome layer of dust, each dirty diaper, each repeat argument or area where nobody listened to me or thoughtlessly interrupted what I was doing, turning me into Sisyphus on this domestic mountain.

Here I was, becoming a desperate housewife.

So I did the unthinkable. I handed off whole swaths of chores. Things I know I could do well if I wasn’t so bogged down in the minutia of it all. If I hadn’t come to hate it so much.

I told my husband earlier in the year that he’s entirely in charge of dishes and laundry, and I’m going to go to the gym and I’m going to do some volunteer work on weekends and evenings while he watches the kids.

I know most of us give lip service to equality, but it has become painfully clear to me that men weren’t taught that our equality requires them doing more of the dishes and laundry. So what I did is still seen as wrong, an imposition I am making, something good women aren’t supposed to do.

Meanwhile I read ostensibly feminist thinkpieces talking about the problem of emotional labor or domestic workload whose authors somehow the find a way to tack on “but at least my own dear husband isn’t that way.” I roll my eyes.

Then I write my cover letter, where I take credit for group projects. It all feels so awkward until I ask myself if a mediocre white man would take credit and hand off chores without guilt. He would.

My husband, now stuck under a neverending pile of dishes and laundry that he is perpetually behind on, complains, without irony, that he’s doing everything and I’m doing nothing.

I sign my daughter up for kindergarten and make sure my son doesn’t spill his breakfast or eat kibble out of the cat food dispenser, while I angrily contemplate divorce with divided custody as a way to teach a clueless coparent a lesson.

Instead I edit my cover letter as a matriarch. Someone who is providing for a family, seeing the bigger picture, and re-sharpening the blade that is my mind.

I will shred up and further redistribute this thankless role.

I see now that taking credit makes the writing flow concisely, lets a reader quickly know why I should be considered for a job. It is not plagiaristic and doesn’t have to diminish the work of others to say I did it.

Anyway, I am the one trying to get hired here. The time for talking up other people’s contributions, and what it’s like to work with them, exists in later conversations.

I also have enough humility to know that it is almost never the case where I’m doing everything. I am a cog in a whole set of wheels, always part of a larger setup, but that embeddedness doesn’t mean my work somehow doesn’t count. Rather it’s the opposite. It counts for even more.

We all know that when mothers don’t mother, whole generations of families are at risk of permanent harm.

But I think about how easily these scripts get twisted and flipped and turned inside out while we go underresourced and devalued. How we claim motherhood is a woman’s dream, an instinct of sorts, but then abandon her in it, talk down to her like she’s just some stupid breeder while literally leaving the work of humanity’s training and survival in her hands. Yet sometimes other women, who you’d think would at least know better, become the worst about it, unthinking in the ways they pass on the reflexive hazing and societal judgment they too have faced.

My mother in law comes over, bringing noodles and criticism, telling me I need to do a better job of cleaning my house, forgetting that she handed each of her two month old infants to her own grandmother and mother before heading back out to a third world paycheck. Someone else did the diapering and wiped up the milk day after day. She never knew how hard all this little stuff gets. She had a different kind of difficulty.

I feel how a pattern of undermining and invisibility happens until as women, we are prone to getting confused and lost, doubtful, unable to get the imposter syndrome out of our heads long enough to function at a higher gear, struggling with what even could be right for us if we had the support.

I suck up my residual strength. I tap into my network. I go in for another interview. It starts to look like it’s a pretty sure thing, so I begin to fish around for referrals, a housecleaner, a nanny.

“How are you going to take care of the new baby?” I get asked by people who should be offering congratulations that I’ve made it this far. “Shouldn’t you wait until she is older?” “Maybe you need an easier job?”

Except this is my surprise third baby but not my surprise first rodeo. I’ve looked around. I’ve taken stock of where the bull and the clowns are.

There’s no way I’m not going to go for a work-from-home job where I’ll make more money than my husband. A place where someone I trust already works. A place where I’d get to do some stuff I’m already good at, other things I’ve done before but want to do more of, and an opportunity to try my hand at things I think I’d be good at, given the chance.

So I tell myself to refocus and leave my world open for success whenever I catch myself rewriting these old stories of impending feminine failure in the empty margins, among the questionable prompts.

I put my toddler son in the Y playroom for two hours a day, letting him learn to make friends while I go work out with a friend of my own, inching towards a place that makes me feel more healthy and whole.

Three months in, I can already see results.

I learn that my gym time has improved my blood sugar so much that rather than going on insulin for my last trimester, as predicted, my diabetes medication dosage will be halved. I don’t need any blood pressure medicine either.

I wonder what took me so long to get here. It all seems deceptively simple. But I know.

“Would a mediocre white man think twice about any of this?” I ask myself. “No. He’d make sure he was able to do slightly over half of the work listed in the job description, he’d write the cover letter, and he’d interview with confidence that he’d be taking care of his life, his family, his reputation as a provider. He would go to the gym if he felt so inclined. He would not care for a minute that his children need a nanny or someone else is scrubbing his toilet.”

I think about all the ways I provide and keep the guardrails up. How I cooked a bag of frozen dumplings the other night. And then made tacos. Reminded my husband that he had leftover fried chicken wings and we were not going to be ordering pizza.

I went to the bulk grocery store and the Asian market. My pantry is stocked and my house is full of fresh fruit and vegetables.

I want to keep doing some of these things. I don’t want to give up domestic life entirely. But I don’t want to keep the pattern I’ve had, and I need help and respect to get out of it. Assistance to get domestically unstuck from people who actually understand.

I take a deep breath and pick up my phone. It’s time to text a friend. Actually several friends.

I remind myself to give people an opportunity show up for me. And they do.

Natalie comes to help me move my kids’ furniture into a shared bedroom. Audrey helps me sort my overflowing closet and relocate my desk. Lexie takes some baby items I don’t need to someone who does. Bessie says she’ll help me go through all the kids toys for downsizing and donation. Alla and Courtney will bring me some select baby things that I do need. Lisa and Chi make housecleaner recommendations.

These are all women who’ve been here, who get it. Raising kids and navigating careers and sorting out health and relationships. Doing both the invisible and visible work.

I try not to feel naked in front of each of them as I let my guard down and give up the illusion of mastery, of having everything figured out. As I let them help me, and watch with gratefulness and friendship as they happily do so.

It is a barn-building of sorts, and I am the barn.

I think about how it is women like us who are doing the real work of humanity while the rich and powerful men in the news dabble in foolishness like mail-order ketamine and taking other prominent racists’ wives, while pretending they run everything. When all they’re doing is hoarding more money than God while they build bombs and shoot rockets, scare the vulnerable, withhold practical support from those who would keep the human world alive.

I wonder if the men of my generation will ever learn that this isn’t the way forward. If anyone will ever make them look it in the eye and shed the tears of horror and grief it deserves. If they will feel moved to guide our sons to feel and see more, do better.

I hope so. I know I’m trying to facilitate it in my own home and can see that it’s one of the biggest and most broken things I’ve undertaken.

Dismantling patriarchal masculinity conditioning isn’t the domain of any one of us, but it is challenging work needing to be done by all of us if we are to move forward.

So I watch my husband get out the vacuum cleaner and dust a ceiling fan, then sit for three hours sorting out what our children need, building them elaborate marble works towers, while I launch myself, with plenty of help, back into career woman land.

Breadwinner territory.