Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [91]
I paused for a second. If I help with post holes today, I can do the laundry quickly first, skip the hoeing, and catch up to where I wanted to be rentwise this week. Of course, digging postholes is no vacation.
“Sure.”
“One o’clock?”
“Uh…how ’bout one-thirty?”
“Okay.” And he trundled away up the hill.
“Eric, I’m still waiting!” Mary called from the bedroom.
“Be there in a second.” Oh, I forgot about that. If I pour some of this water into the kettle for dishes, I can get it heating while I fix the machine, and when lunch is over I can clean up in a jiffy.
“Eric!!”
“Right there.”
“Can you help Hans? I see he just spit up. Do you smell something burning?”
Simone de Beauvoir portrayed the entire history of male-female relations as one long, willing submission on the woman’s part to a monopoly of male power. But before she ever made this pronouncement, G. K. Chesterton noted the plight of frustrated working-class housewives in London and observed: “The woman does not work because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man to work, and he hasn’t obeyed.”
With my recent experiences in the country, I tended to lean towards Chesterton’s account. I had grave doubts, anyhow, that a tacit patriarchy could account for the kinds of privation many modern feminists would attribute to it. From what I’d seen in the wider technological world, I would not describe the ruling order as “patriarchy” at all. A closer term might be “tetrarchy”—rule by the square-edged. Where everything has to conform to the well-defined slots of a mechanical order, there is no place for something well-rounded, something fuzzier and hard to define—thus no value for what Betty Friedan portrayed as the “feminine mystique.” Friedan, by the way, in that famous book told how the call to motherhood precluded her hoped-for career as a professional psychologist. Thus, given the state of the world around her, femininity—or more properly, fuzzily indicated, undercompensated women’s household duties—diminished any clear sense of self. Friedan’s book might never have been necessary had she grown up on a working homestead. The job description of a subsistence farmer is so mushy and all-encompassing, it would dissolve the self-definition of the modern high-achiever in an instant.
It was not until this morning, however, that I realized the implications of Friedan’s pronouncement for my own manhood. The birth of our baby had coincided with one of the busiest times of the year, planting season. And now, one month later, neither the crops nor Hans was showing any sign of slowing down their vaulting growth. And Mary and I had not yet worked out any reasonable division of tasks. One sign of this failure was the frequent claim by one of us: “That’s not my job.” In a crunch, each expected the other to fetch food from the cellar, heat the water, hoe the garden, pick the summer squash—tasks that before seemed to belong to whoever stumbled onto them.
We took a trip to K-Mart for baby supplies. The store was across the parking lot from the mall where I sold my sorghum. When we got to the check-out counter, $127.46 lit up. The cart was laden with a small mattress, cloth diapers, baby blankets, and an infant car seat. Mary looked at me. I looked at Mary. Didn’t she know that baby items were the mother’s responsibility? “Can’t you use your credit card?” I asked.
It wasn’t helping that neither Mary nor I had had a decent night’s sleep since the birth. Hans, unfortunately, was what’s known as a “night nurser.” We gawked with envy at those mothers in the community who held their sucking infants tight to their breasts during reasonable daylight hours, then laid them gently in their cribs at dusk, contentedly glutted on warm milk.
Hans was alive and alert the whole day long—no time for such details as nutriment or maternal comfort. He was a serious boy, an industrious boy, a boy who would go far, a boy who would not waste time on trifling matters. He’d rather reach for