What’s Wrong with This Picture

A friend recently posted a photo on Facebook that consisted of a list of what the wife does between the time she says she’s going to bed and actually goes to bed, on the left, and what the husband does in the same sequence.

It’s meant to show how uneven the domestic work load is. It’s meant to make us feel for the woman and turn against the man, the worthless shit.

I find so many things wrong here, so deeply, fundamentally wrong, something that rankles me to the core, that I’m surprised I’m not ranting and gushing obscenities as I write (it’s what I’d expected of myself).

It describes the woman I’ve always avoided, the domestic drone of 1950s conservative fantasy. The woman who knows her place. The woman who thinks the most important thing in the world is the perfect family, which begins with the perfect home.

Does she really consider all these activities more important than sleep? “Clean the glass on the back door”—you’ve got to be kidding.

I also find her self-deception disturbing. Why would she say she’s going to bed knowing she’ll do all those other things first? It looks manipulative and passive aggressive. It looks like she’s trying to show him up and put him in his place with guilt.

Without knowing his situation I’d have to nod along with everyone else that he is that worthless shit we’re supposed to see him as. Why wasn’t he helping with all those petty domestic chores?

There’s so much stereotyping.

What happened to feminism?

Why does this couple seem to linger in an outdated era playing meaningless roles?

A very important question neither asked nor answered in this poster is: what were they doing all day. Do both of them have jobs outside the house? Are their jobs stressful or physically exhausting? If they both have day jobs, did both of them do household chores before dinner, such as making dinner, helping the kids with homework, fixing things around the house?

My automatic response was that I don’t like either of them. I have long rejected the male roles that I was expected to occupy and I’ve rejected the women who would have complimented me in those roles. You can consider me selfish if you like.

Some of her activities are important, such as packing the kids’ lunches (assuming the lunches are for the kids and not the husband) and signing the school papers. Brushing your teeth and locking the door are also (probably) necessary and acceptable things to do after you’ve said you’re going to bed. But the rest? Is it really necessary to finish the laundry and dishes or to pick up toys?

Sleep should come first.

I’m not even going to get into the needs of an artist who has to work a meaningless day job and how that impacts the alleged importance of domestic conformity. Who’s life are we living anyway? Why would someone waste their life and health satisfying some pathetic social fantasy?

Yes, I am of the era in which it was important to find one’s self and fuck social expectations. Sometimes I think we were right and sometimes it made us a generation of selfish whiners.

I’ll tell you here and now that our relationship at home has come to resemble the stereotype more than either of us would like. We started out close to 50-50 on the domestic chores. Over the years I’ve backed away from the complexity and grind of raising a family, as well as succumbing to the exhaustion of earning a living. (I’m not going to discuss my partner’s possible flaws. I’ll just say it’s not entirely me being a selfish shit.)

What’s really missing in the relationship portrayed is any sense of a common goal, of discussing what really matters and agreeing on who does what. Those two people, and sometimes my partner and I, are just going through the motions of living.

 

Integrity in an Ever Changing Life

The question is integrity, how can it be maintained as the self is created?

I’ll tell you now I have no answers. It’s been a long time since I’ve needed answers. I just like what happens when questions are asked.

Whether or not they know it, every parent watches their child create a self. For most of us this seems to happen once, or so we think, and we try to stay true to that self. Usually we follow the general rules of our culture in creating a self and it strongly resembles all the surrounding selves. So we spend endless hours publicly and privately defining the tedious details that make that self me rather than you (“I’m the sort of person who…”). For the most part it’s a thoughtless process, usually reactionary rather than active and seeking. I find it about as interesting as someone’s recipe for doctoring Hamburger Helper.

For the past couple of years I’ve been watching my younger child working through this more consciously than most of us have done, working their way through the possibilities of gender. We could say the process is a transition from female to male but it’s more complex and interesting than that. A lot of the kids, mine included, consider themselves “gender queer”. They are not accepting the either/or mandate of the mass culture. They are not calling themselves male or female, straight or gay, they’re not even calling themselves bi, as many of my generation did. They might consider their identity ambiguous but not necessarily androgynous. As I said, it’s an interesting process. I love the fluidity of it. I consider these kids amorphous but I doubt they would think of themselves that way—they do have an end in mind.

Many years ago I read Robert Jay Lifton’s The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation. His primary interest was the German mind that could adapt to the cruelties of the Nazi era, especially at the camps, and how people can recreate themselves in times of stress.

I took something else out of Lifton’s book. First of all, it was an eye opener for me, the whole idea that we create ourselves. Of course that’s a no-brainer but sometimes we need someone else to draw a circle around something before we can see it. I know this is true for myself—I doubt I’ve ever seen anything before someone else has pointed it out. It could stop there and I could fail to see outside that circle, as too many people seem to do.  Instead, once I began to see that we do indeed create ourselves, I began to see it as an ongoing process. We only pretend it stops at a certain point. Many of us will build up incredible barricades to maintain that illusion. But life changes us. Whether we actively change our self to accommodate life or do so passively, we are no longer the person we were.

I had an intuitive understanding of this long before I read Lifton but he gave form to thought. We are constantly recreating ourselves.

With that in mind: what is integrity and how do we maintain it?