WARNING: Long post.

Dammit, Cesar Millan is right about EVERYTHING. (Photos appearing here have nothing at all to do with this post. But they are mostly about knitting, and not very interesting.)

Over the weekend dh and I watched a few episodes of The Dog Whisperer, and the past few nights the kids and I have been watching them while dh is out of town. It’s great for the kids to watch, because they get a better understanding of how to be around dogs, and also they can go tell their mom about it, since she still is feeling so terribly sad about the fact that we don’t pet Gracee when she’s a spastic freak – because we all know that it is much less sad than the fact that she had Gracee for three months and then decided “she wasn’t for her.”

Anyway.

I’ve been reading books about dog behavior, too, and implementing lots of things from each, and I must say, me and G are seeing results. But this isn’t about Gracee.

I posted last about having a bad, bad, very bad week, and I’m still processing a lot of what happened. To sum up, work was, for once, actually very busy. Our kind of busy is strange, though – it’s not like I’m running around doing this and that and everything in between. Busy looks like this: me, sitting with extremely bad posture, staring blankly at a computer screen, and clicking through files – a lot of them. I might change something here and there, but the main thing is to check for a single, maybe two, items and possible alter it. Do this 504 times, and then again for a different set. It’s repetition over and over again. That would be redundant except that I had to check several different sets of files, so I entered this meta world of click repeat. It’s not hard to see why I felt like a drone. I’ve been at this job for three years, and while it’s not really that long, when the nature of the work never changes, and you’re in your 30s, have an MFA in writing, watch two of your close friends get agents, and one who just started writing gets a piece published rather quickly, and then you look in the mirror and you’re in a robe, frantically clicking files, thinking about dinner while your husband calls and asks if you got groceries yet, and then the car doesn’t start suddenly and you can’t fix it, and the kids’ mom asks if you can watch the kids while she works because you’re home working, then suddenly you feel like everything and nothing at all.

DISCLAIMER #1 (mostly to myself): I am not writing a blog to show off my writing prowess, OBVIOUSLY. So for the few who do read my crazy run on stuff and think “um I know why you don’t write and why you aren’t published” please note I don’t edit this very much and what I write is very, very different from my regular banter style. Most people are surprised when they read my prose – they almost always say it’s nothing like what they expected. Bigger tangent: once, when I told a late 40ish gentleman whom I just met that I was a writer, he asked, “So what do you write, romance?” A$$hole. And actually, I am published, thank you very much. It was just a… long time ago. #$()&&$%. Anyhoo.

DISCLAIMER #2: I am not blogging in hopes of getting a book contract blah blah blah. My damn novel-in-perpetual-progress is historical and has nothing at all to do with knitting or buying a crack house. (Pot house is more correct but it’s far less dramatic.)

On that particular day of not getting the groceries and agreeing to take the kids while I worked so someone else could work and all the other crap, I later met up with some writer friends for an agreed upon bitch session. I was aptly nicknamed “El Presidente” of the bitching, and so my bitching was saved for last. But when I got to me, I didn’t bitch (okay, I did, a lot): I sobbed.

I totally broke down. It just hit me all at once. I felt like everything I was doing was half-a$$ed, and that none of it felt satisfying. I became a housewife, but couldn’t fully participate in that role because of the stupid job and housewife just ain’t all that satisfying either. I have this job, but it’s sucking my soul dry. I sometimes teach, but can’t score a contract to save my life. I am a mom, but not to kids of “my own”, so I reside in this no man’s land of struggling with being the primary caregiver and resentment over that, and not knowing just what is enough, too much, too little, and feeling like I am always being evaluated over my “mother” performance. I am a writer, but I haven’t worked on my book in a year and a half. Instead, I got married, took on extra classes, moved to a crazy house, and began single handedly draining the world’s oil by driving the kids everywhere.

There was a lot of indignity about my dh’s role in the housework and the kids, and lots of support given to me in general. I went home after that feeling both depressed and righteously indignant about myself, and directing the venom towards dh. And the days following, I promptly decided to skip most grooming, skimp on my dog’s walks, barely eat, and in general, be a moping mess.

I thought a lot about my women’s studies, feminism, where I was at, my goals, and just how did I get to sitting at home in this robe earning crap cash after two frickin’ graduate degrees! I couldn’t stop thinking about how as time went on, dh and I keep falling into such traditional gender roles, and with a lot of ease. Sometimes it feels good, even. I can’t lie and say that I don’t mind being home (most of the time). The thought of getting a new job in which I have to manage sh*t and lose flexibility and have a title makes me shudder – not because I can’t do it (I have had those jobs before) but because I just really, really don’t like that life for myself. I love to create, and I love to have things orderly (which are two things that don’t always go together) and it’s always been a goal of mine to channel both those drives into a book and to make my career out of that and at the same time, avoid the 8 to 5. I started to do that, when I went back to school. But then life got in the way; divorce was a big derailment. But after that, I got back on the horse. I finished my draft – all 403 pages. However, there just isn’t enough preparation in the world for entering into stepmotherhood, crack house ownership, and marrying an English dude who has difficulty closing a cupboard door, but is a demon with a jigsaw.

In many ways, I didn’t feel feminist enough. In grad school, it seemed that many of us came out feeling empowered with our knowledge of feminist theory and yet at the same time, denigrating some of the things we knew as traditionally feminine. We whispered to each other about the things we just couldn’t give up – shaving our legs for nearly all of us; for one, her red lipstick; for me, any lipstick at all. I published an article about the tyranny of the women’s fitness empire and yet worked out feverishly. (That was then, this is now. HA!) When my niece told me she wanted to be a cheerleader, I told her she really ought to play basketball.

And now, it all makes me think about choice. I wanted to be home more; I wanted to be more in charge of the house. I said I could help out more with the kids. If this is my choice, then that’s feminist enough. My dh never told me I had to do that; he knows I’d kick him flying and that’s not his MO anyway. He would love for me to earn more money, since we need money in a big way, but he also knows how unhappy I’d be, so we live this way. Yes, he has room for improvement in this area, to be sure, and he can ask me just a few too many times about getting the groceries, but he also has no flexibility with work, always goes to Costcohell, is an amazing dad, and well, I’m just not the one to trust with putting up a ceiling fan. He shoveled gravel for an hour an a half on Saturday while I vacuumed and mopped. Each needed to get done, and each got done well – and along old gender lines. But we were a team, and we agreed on it, and liked the results.

When dh and I finally talked about just why I fell over the cliff into a fetal position, he was amazing. And tough on me. We will agree to disagree on some housework issues, but aside from last week, it’s true that I don’t generally have a full workload. My work is easy, if not boring as hell. And when I get so sad and despondent about not writing, he understands. On the one hand, it’s incredibly busy; my mom pointed out to me that with the kids at this age, we are in the busiest time of life. I married that, by choice, and now I share the responsibility. I have the ability to be more flexible, and that helps us out and saves cash with daycare. But dh also pointed out that I needed to make it happen; I need to put down the needles and put the fingers back to the keyboard. Just start out with two Sundays a month, he said. We’ll take it from there. He’ll put in the flooring or tinker with something electrical while I’m away with my beloved (and newly fixed after Rich Uncle THREW it) iBook.

Hello, old friend.

And then, watching that damn dog whisperer, I realized that dh was right. I have to take control now. (I must master my own walk!) I love knitting, but just like that dog who couldn’t stop searching for the light, or the one who obsessed over the ball, sometimes knitting just became an outlet for me to soothe that frenzied need to create, to finish a project all my own. I’ve done that with other hobbies too – painting, ceramics, photography – and got pretty good at some. But the book is what I want, and if I work on it and get it good and put it out there, what will happen will happen. (And I’ll still knit, DUH.) If I don’t get published, that’ll suck. Then again, I know that writing is not an easy thing. That’s my risk and my choice. If I do become successful, well that’s a result of my own hard work and the support of my friends and family. Again, that damn Cesar is right. You have to change, you have to try. And you have to redirect your energy to something more positive. Forgive me for the cheesiness, but if these roses can survive amidst the jungle that is our yard, well then I can too.

So you know what? I clean the house. And I work too – but really not very much, and that’s okay. I will still struggle over it, but there isn’t much I can do about that right now, so it will be what it will be. I handle more of the day to day stuff with the kids than dh, and we’ll struggle some with that. Yet, they love me and I am a rockin’ stepmum. (This week we are dyeing yarn with Kool Aid – aww yeah…) And it’s only every other week. So if I don’t write, that’s not anyone else’s fault but my own. I keep waiting for the situation to be just right, but that’s in someone else’s hands. And if anything is feminist enough, it’s taking the reins.

Even if I’m wearing a robe (as I am now) while doing it.

And on a very different note, I thought cats were the ones who destroyed yarn. I guess not.

(Start of a moss grid handtowel from Mason-Dixon Knitting).