To Hell With All That

It was an impulse buy. I picked up Caitlin Flanagan's To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife on a whim and started reading it while the kids picked out toys at Big Lots. (Yes, Big Lots. And it was only $3.00.)

My seven year-old daughter was scandalized by the title: "That's a bad word, Mama!" But, of course, that's what makes the title so good. Who hasn't felt that way at some time or other? Especially about being a housewife!

If the title hooked me, the jacket flap reeled me in: "In To Hell with All That, [Flanagan] examines the central concerns of women's private lives—weddings, sex, nannies, housekeeping, marriage, children—in a blazingly fresh light that turns a familiar discourse on its head." And I knew I absolutely had to buy it when I found myself crying in the aisle upon reading Flanagan’s rationale for hanging on to her eleventh grade report card, which her recently deceased mother had kept for so many years: "The slip of paper was not a testament of past academic glory, only of a hard new fact: there was no longer anyone in the world who loved me enough to save my report cards and school pictures and Christmas poems. I wasn't anyone's daughter anymore."

I expected the book to continue in that meditative and emotional realm. However, it ended up engaging not only my emotions, but also my intellect. It caused me to think about my values in light of what I’ve learned in the past eleven years of married life and seven years of motherhood. Flanagan describes this as "a book about what we [women] have lost," and she says that this loss happened as a result of "what conservatives call the feminist agenda and what I call the new prescription for female unhappiness."

Although I don't want to, I agree with so much in this book.

Much of it goes against the grain of my feminist consciousness. This consciousness was raised in the twelfth grade when, at a classmate's suggestion, I read The Women's Room by Marilyn French, and it was reinforced by four years of a Vassar education. And I certainly don't regret that consciousness-raising. It’s been an integral part of my identity and has shaped many of my goals and expectations. I am incredibly grateful to the women who came before me and demanded that women be respected not only in the home but in the workplace. But I do think this came with some costs, and Flanagan articulates those costs clearly, without anger or derision but with a sense of befuddlement and longing to which I relate.

Like me, she was raised by a woman who excelled at and seemed to come naturally to housework. My mother, about a decade younger than Flanagan's, has always (as far as I know) been a graceful cook and housekeeper, while at the same time literate and engaged in the outside world. She washed the sheets each week, kept the house spotless, divided up the chores between my brother and me, made lists, packed lunches, gathered the family for breakfast and supper every day. She seemed to have a strong sense of self as housewife and mother, even after she returned to teaching when I was in the ninth grade. I never saw her get angry or seem lonely or express resentment. Other than a brief outburst about everyone taking their own dishes to the kitchen—which, as far as I remember, we did from that moment on—all I remember witnessing was domestic harmony. And I am grateful for having grown up this way.

But, as much as I try to give my own children a similarly harmonious and carefree childhood, I find myself questioning if this is happening when I shove the occasional breakfast bars in their hands on the way out the door or remember approximately once a month to wash the sheets. I manage to make supper most nights, but with soccer and music schedules and my weekly night class and my husband's meetings, we don't always end up eating it at the same time. I often end up comparing myself—and not measuring up—to the standard set by my mother.

Most days I'm content with the fact that my children are happy and healthy, that with my teaching schedule I can contribute to our household finances and do work that keeps me intellectually engaged, while also having more time for family and "homemaking" than most working moms. And there are plenty of transcendent moments when I marvel at my children and thank God for trusting me with them. But there's a voice from another place that tells me I may be doing too much, that I work just as hard outside the home as my husband and that he should be doing more to help out in this drudgery that is housework and parenting. And on the days when I have too many essays to grade and a sick child and a mound of laundry and... and... and... well, sometimes resentment builds—occasionally towards my husband, but mostly towards myself, for somehow unwittingly putting myself in this overwhelming situation.

I don't completely identify with Flanagan. She states honestly that she's never had to do much housework; she has always had "help." The idea of sharing housework and childcare with her husband is purely theoretical because they have a maid and a nanny. While we do have a maid who comes once a week for a few hours (a condition of my going back to work full-time when our younger child turned one), there is still quite a bit of daily maintenance that needs to be done. And it doesn’t always get done.

Flanagan lives in a world that on the surface is quite different from my everyday reality. She lives in suburban Los Angeles; I live in a small town in Mississippi. She works from home; I work outside the home. Her husband's salary alone can pay for what most two-income families (including mine) can barely, if at all, afford. And yet, the quandary she describes seems applicable to women in most locales and many tax brackets.

Flanagan presents two familiar but conflicting visions/expectations of women that have emerged over the past forty years or so:
(1) woman as equal partner in marriage and parenting, as powerful agent in the workforce, and
(2) woman as nurturer and homemaker.

She describes the impressive and swift changes brought on by the women's movement, and asserts that they have come with some costs (and this is what I don't want to acknowledge, but my gut tells me it is true). While this fact would exasperate old-school feminists, I believe her writing would resonate with many of my friends as it does with me.

Her writing is nuanced. Caitlin Flanagan is no Phyllis Schlafly admonishing women to stay at home and kowtow to their husbands (all the while jetsetting around on the lecture circuit). Flanagan is a liberal-minded woman who found her experience with motherhood completely flabbergasting and her relationship with housework frustratingly complex. Having been told that housework is drudgery, there's no desire to do it, and yet there's the appreciation and awe for a well-kept house á la Martha Stewart. Flanagan longs for the life that Erma Bombeck wrote about with such humor and self-effacement. Bombeck, already an independent working mother, was shocked and offended when Betty Friedan admonished her and her friends that that they were living oppressed lives of quiet desperation.

Flanagan doesn’t argue that things should revert to the (not-necessarily-so-) good old days. She claims this to be a sort of elegy for what is lost forever. And what’s lost is gone even to those women who have taken on the traditional role of homemaker, because this is now a choice, set in relief to other possibilities. But she does seem to suggest that we could reclaim some of the lost simplicity. What I read into To Hell With All That is that we could be a little more sacrificial in our lives, recognizing that maybe we can't quite have it all, as well as reclaiming a Bombeck-esque sense of humor over the little things.

Flanagan boils down her philosophy in a paragraph in the last chapter, and, in my opinion, this should be the motto of parents everywhere:

"It turns out that many aspects of adult life that I have always considered complicated and messy and finely nuanced are in fact simple and clear-cut: life can be lived in pursuit of that old dog, happiness, or it can be neatly fitted around obligation and sacrifice. Happiness may be a by-product of doing the right thing. But even if it’s not, what matters—once you have had children, once you have decided to make a good life for them—is that you behave yourself."

When Flanagan first published these essays in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, I was trying to get pregnant (and not wanting to think about any conflicting emotions motherhood might engender) and then experiencing motherhood for the first time, in all its complexity and wonderment and exhaustion. So if I saw the essays, I didn't pay much attention. But the cover flap says that the essays "became an immediate sensation and the subject of an ongoing and heated national discussion." I'm not surprised.

Two Apocalyptic Scenarios: Atwood's Flood, McCarthy's Road

I have always been an idealistic—unrealistic?—pacifist. When I moved alone to Austin at age 22, with my freshly-earned liberal arts degree and a vague notion of going to law school, my father offered to buy me a gun. Looking back, and having my own children now, I can see why he worried about his little girl in the big city. But at the time I thought he’d gone bonkers. I contemplated joining the Quakers for a couple of years, and one of my most treasured and admired friends was a brilliant man I met at the Quaker meeting who had been a conscientious objector during World War II. It’s not that I denied that evil existed, but I figured that if it was my time to go, so be it, but I wasn’t going to participate in violence. Give peace a chance, turn the other cheek, and all that jazz.

But over the last month, two books have made me think that having a gun on hand might not be a bad idea. I wouldn’t use it. I’d bury it. Just in case the apocalypse were to come and by some miracle, well, actually the complete opposite of a miracle, I were to survive.

One of these books is Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood. It is by far one of the stranger books I've read, but I keep thinking about it, which tells me it was pretty good. For the first several chapters, before I completely figured out what was going on, I kept thinking my stumbling block to getting into it was my aversion to futuristic dystopian apocalyptic scenarios. But when I'm honest with myself, I have to admit that I actually enjoy futuristic dystopian apocalyptic scenarios. Some of the most fascinating and influential books I've read include 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and even The Handmaid's Tale, the only book by Atwood I'd read until this one.

The Year of the Flood takes place sometime in the future, but not terribly far in the future—maybe sometime in the 2020s (there are still laptops and cellphones, and they function pretty much like the ones we have today)—and is structured around the alternating narrations of two women, Toby and Ren, interspersed with "hymns" of the Gardeners, a religious cult that teaches reverence for the earth as well as practical skills in gardening and foraging. The Gardeners’ religion has been formed in reaction to mainstream society's increasing reliance on genetically engineered food and superficial soul-eroding pursuits, which are slowly killing the environment. Toby is a woman who had some tough breaks before being rescued by the Gardeners and eventually becoming one of the cult leaders. The other narrator, Ren, grows up with the Gardeners, but ends up as a prostitute in a high-dollar dance club. Both women survive the "waterless flood," a pandemic that eradicates a huge number of the human race.

I became enveloped in this world, eventually deciding that the scenario is scarily possible. The names of places and corporations give the story an exaggerated feel, and it would almost be comical if it didn't read as prophecy.

But now that I’ve read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, another dystopian novel, The Year of the Flood almost does seem like a comedy .

In The Road, a man and his young son—I imagine the son to be about nine—travel in a devastated, burnt world, pushing all of their belongings in a grocery cart, trying to survive where there are few people and no vegetation. The people they do encounter are likely to be rapists and cannibals, so must be avoided. The only thing that propels them forward is the love they have for each other. The man tells his son that they are the ones who carry “the fire,” which the reader comes to understand as this powerful love. The story is told in McCarthy’s stupefyingly powerful prose. I came to admire McCarthy after reading All the Pretty Horses, but The Road is different. The Road stands alone. I had the same feeling when I finished it as when I finished reading The Sound and The Fury: This is IT. This is what literature is about.

I finished The Road while sitting on the porch swing at the front of our house. It was a perfect cloudless Saturday in April: azaleas were blooming, birds were chirping, the lawn had just greened up from the winter. Looking up from this novel, which was most definitely the darkest novel I’d ever read—and by that I don’t just mean the darkness of human nature that it revealed, because it also revealed an incredible lightness, and even a glimmer of hope, but I mean the world of the novel was literally dark: there was no color in it, everything was burned, their clothes and their bodies were filthy, the sun was forever hidden by the gray—suddenly the world around me was more colorful than I’d ever noticed it to be. In contrast to the world of The Road, my life was a fluorescent Technicolor wonderland. I felt more alive at that moment than I had in a long time.

Back to the guns. In both novels, the protagonists were able to produce guns, which kept them alive after the apocalypse. In The Year of the Flood, Toby has a rifle that was once her father’s and was buried in their former suburban back yard. The man in The Road has a gun too, and it is absolutely essential to his and his son’s survival. Honestly, I’m really not sure I’d want to be alive at that point (and the gun could be used to take care of that; in fact, the mother of the boy in The Road had taken that route). But if the will to survive were to trump the desire to die at that point, these novels both indicate that a gun could be essential, mainly for protection. Maybe I need to take my dad up on his offer after all.

But it seems trite to end a discussion of these two books on this note. They can't be boiled down to my desire to purchase a gun. Both of them kept my attention; I had a hard time putting either down, and I have thought about both long after finishing. Atwood's novel was fantastical and enjoyable, if scary. It comes across as a political message, but it was also good reading, and truthfully, it's a prophecy that I wish more people would read and heed. McCarthy's was a book that I will remember and reread and recommend. It may be prophecy, but more than that, it's poetry.

Hanging curtains Ivan Ilych-style

In my ongoing attempt to make our house a home despite my thrifty tendencies, I decided a few months ago to purchase some curtains for our den. We already had curtains, but they were makeshift homemade cafe-style ones that I had never spent the time to hem. The unraveling had gotten out of hand, and our dachshund had chewed the ones he could get to from the back of the couch. It just made the den feel shabby, and I didn't enjoy being in there. So I surfed my way to JCPenney.com during their January home sale (as I said, I am thrifty), and found some really quite attractive curtains and rods for a very decent price. Just the thing to make the den feel more homey--and to make me feel like a real grown-up (I'm almost 38; it's about time for me to have some real curtains. Or are they drapes? What's the correct term anyway? Does the fact that I don't know the difference between curtains and drapes mean that I'm not really a grown-up? No matter. More important existential questions will be addressed later in this piece, and "curtains" will have to suffice).

Of course, as with all best-laid plans, some of the rods were backordered. The ones that came in right away I immediately put up. I felt very self-satisfied about (1) having pretty darn good taste, (2) getting such a good deal, and (3) being so resourceful as to put them up myself. But two windows sat undressed until the rods finally arrived about a month ago. A few weeks later, while the kids were at school on my day "off" (translation: my only day to grade essays, grocery shop, wash and fold the week's laundry, pay bills, and do any other miscellaneous household chores), I carved out a few minutes to hang the rods. By this time, I was an expert on hanging them, so I didn't expect it to take long. I got out the step-ladder and the necessary tools and went to work.

I should have known better. In our 100 year-old house, the floors aren't level and the walls are made up of who-knows-what, and it turned out that the wall these rods were going on was not as cooperative as the wall the other rods had gone on. So I fought with the rods, made all kinds of marks on the wall, dented and nicked the paint in numerous spots, and eventually ended up with a painful boo-boo on my forehead when the rod refused to go onto the anchor that I'd finally managed to install and instead reared up and almost knocked me off the ladder. After much cursing (good thing the kids were at school) I did finally get the rods and curtains up. It turned out that the nicks were barely noticeable once the curtains were there, and this wall looked just as nice as the other wall. The den was finally complete.

About an hour later, as I washed my hands in the bathroom, I took a glance in the mirror and gasped when I saw that I was bleeding profusely! I had thought it was just a bruise. Anyway, I cleaned it off, put on a Barbie bandaid, and went on to fold the laundry. No biggie.

It was about a week later, as I was preparing for my World Lit. II class, that I made the Ivan connection. The title character of Tolstoy's famous novella The Death of Ivan Ilych (depending on the translation, the spelling of his name differs, but this doesn't change the fact that I'm sure I consistently mispronounce it), encounters something eerily similar:

"Once when mounting a step-ladder to show the upholsterer, who did not understand, how he wanted the hangings draped, [Ivan] made a false step and slipped, but being a strong and agile man he clung on and only knocked his side against the knob of the window frame. The bruised place was painful but the pain soon passed, and he felt particularly bright and well just then."

Oh my! This injury, which Ivan laughed off just as I had, was the beginning of the end! Obviously, there are a few minor differences: I wasn't talking to an upholsterer--I'm a do-it-yourself kind of gal--and I knocked my forehead, not my side. But other than that, the situation is quite similar, don't you think?

A wave of self-examination followed: Am I like Ivan in other ways?

Am I over-concerned with appearances?

Does the fact that I was so eager to replace the curtains in our den indicate that, like Ivan, I'm a vain, superficial middle-class professional who wants to make a good outward impression while hiding internal moral shortcomings?

If I were to die tomorrow, would my coworkers' first thought concern who would take my place? Would my family's primary preoccupation be how inconvenient my illness and death are to them?

OK, so I admit that I really don't take the last few questions seriously. I'm pretty sure that I'd be missed if I were to die tomorrow, that I'm a pretty moral and ethical person, that I'm not a carbon copy of Ivan.

However, re-reading The Death of Ivan Ilych, which I do every semester that I teach it, reminds me that examining my life, and in particular my values, is a good thing to do every so often. That knot on my forehead could be read, like Ivan's fatal injury, as a reminder that when appearances become more important than compassion for others, we hurt not only ourselves but the ones around us.

But when I examine my motives for putting up new curtains, the similarity to Ivan becomes insignificant. The curtains really do make our den feel warmer and cozier, and it's now a nicer place to spend family time. And that's what it's about--creating a comfortable place for our family. For Ivan, his carefully decorated house was a statement to impress others (although we are told that "in reality it was just what is usually seen in the houses of people of moderate means who want to appear rich"), and was not in any way a sanctuary for his family. But for me, I can accept that, to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a curtain is just a curtain.

And if it turns out that I am like Ivan in more ways than I'd like to admit, Tolstoy ends the novella on a hopeful note, as Ivan is ultimately redeemed on his deathbed. I'd just rather this happened a little earlier for me.

In case you're wondering, the Barbie bandaid was only needed for a few days, and you can barely see where the boo-boo was.