High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [27]
A generation of American women served their nation by being the Army of Moms, and they spent their creative force like the ancient Furies, whipping up cakes and handmade Christmas gifts and afterschool snacks, for a brief time in human history raising the art of homemaking high above the realm of dirt. Some of them fell as casualties to their era, and some won the medal of honor. Either way, they left a lot of us lucky baby boomers with strong teeth and bones and a warm taste of childhood in our mouths. No wonder those old boys are nostalgic. I am too.
Well, but I can also get nostalgic for the childhood of Laura Ingalls Wilder, until it dawns on me that not once, in any of those Little House books, does she discuss the real meaning of life without plumbing on howling cold prairie nights. Every epoch has its prizes and punishments, and there’s no point in wishing my own were any different. The lot I drew in history was to belong to the generation of women groomed implicitly for wifehood, but who have ended up needing to win their bread rather than bake it. I’ve always been happy enough to do it, though now that I’m also supporting a child on my own, I occasionally wake up at night in a cold sweat on account of it; no part of my upbringing ever prepared me to hold this place at the head of the table. But it’s a blessing, I think, to my girl, who is growing up convinced that women belong in the halls of discovery, production, and creation—messy enterprises all. It wouldn’t even occur to her to doubt it. We’ve spent far more time together making kites and forts and scientifically mounted bug collections than working on hospital corners, and if her bed doesn’t even get made, I’m the last to notice. Sluthood has its privileges, for children too.
Housework, like the Buddha, takes many forms, depending on what is in your heart as you approach it. I personally am inclined to approach it the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts. If life were a different house of cards, though, and if housework were my life, you can bet it would acquire a heck of a lot of cachet. I would write book-length grocery lists, and serve meals that Proust would remember longer than those madeleines of his (whatever they were). Virtue in my living room would have the aroma of Lemon Fresh Pledge. My kitchen would be as cryptic as the streets of Venice, and I would be irreplaceable. The burly fellow in charge of keeping the wolf from my door would be lost without me, and I don’t mean maybe. Some of those seemingly innocent dishes in my cabinet might be Molotov Melmac waiting to explode in the microwave. Really. I would never tell which ones.
SEMPER FI
Maybe this has happened to you: You are curled up on the sofa, with an afghan maybe, and the person you love is there too. You are female, because, I’m sorry, but I have the typewriter and you have to be what I say. And he is male. He is watching a contest of an athletic nature on TV, and you, well, you are present and accounted for. The contest is basketball, say, UCLA against Duke, in the NCAA playoffs. He’s rooting for UCLA. You are confused. You were under the impression that he despised UCLA with a purple passion.
“Two weeks ago,” you point out carefully, in the interest of scientific inquiry, “you were calling UCLA a bunch of galoots. You said they couldn’t hit the side of a barn.”
“Two weeks ago they were playing us. But now Arizona’s out of the