Valuing my work

I had a meltdown several weeks ago at my husband, because I felt like I was making time for him to do all kinds of fun things like play his video games on his big new gaming computer or purchase and attempt to restore an old anvil so he can try to make knives on it, but there was no time for me to do those kinds of things. He pointed out that he *does* do work—most of his adventures in his workshop result in things like coffee tables or the very lovely sewing table/desk I’m currently writing this on. I countered that if he quit doing that work, we would still be fine. If *I* quit doing *my* work (which, unlike furniture-building is the sort of goalless repetition that unmakes itself as soon as it’s completed—the laundry is washed, dried, and put away only to be worn again, and the food is prepared only to be eaten and vanish, leaving a huge mess to clear up so that I have space to make a new mess in a few hours making more food), we would starve to death in a filthy house.

I felt had no time to do anything towards a larger goal because I spent all my time doing all these smaller tasks. And it’s not that I don’t enjoy cooking—I have a darling little sourdough starter named the Burblicious Burbletron who lives in a green glass quart jar in my fridge—but I wanted to keep taking steps towards something bigger, something involving writing and research. Not necessarily a full-time job, or even a book, but establishing a voice that people will read because I have something to say, not just because they know me and want to know what I’m up to. It would be great if it involved money.  

But I felt like this wasn’t getting anywhere because I didn’t have the time to focus on it—I was too busy dealing with putting out fires at home because David’s work seemed more valuable than mine and not worth interrupting to deal with all those little piddly things.

I said as much, loudly and furiously and perhaps a bit tearfully.

“Then what do you want me to do?” he demanded.

I opened my mouth, and then closed it again.

Here’s the thing: the problem isn’t that he doesn’t consider his work more important than mine. It’s that I don’t consider my work as important as his. And if *I* don’t ask for what I need because I don’t think I merit it, he can’t give it to me because he doesn’t even know what it is!

About a week later, I opened up my mailbox to discover a check for me, for a little essay I had written for the October issue of Chicago Parent (it’s only in the print version, but it touches indirectly on some other things I’ve been pondering so a different form of the story will probably end up here at some point). It was a very nice little check, and even more so, it reminded me that my words still have value outside my journal and this blog.

Part of why it’s taken me so long to finally put this on the blog, though, is that there are actually two aspects of my devaluing of my own work.

First, I’m assuming that those day-to-day chores are worth less because they are stereotypically feminine. You’ve heard the double-speak, I’m sure, how women are such magnificently self-sacrificial angels for staying home with their kids, but if a man stays home with his children, he’s a loser. Kathleen Norris in The Quotidian Mysteries has pointed out that the word menial

“derives from a Latin word meaning ‘to remain,’ or ‘to dwell in a household.’ It is thus a word about connections, about family and household ties. That it has come to convey something servile, the work of servants, or even slaves, is significant. It may help to explain one of the strangest things about our culture: that in America we willingly pay the garbage collector much more in salary than we pay those who care for our infants in daycare centers. Both might be considered ‘menial’ jobs, but the woman’s work, the care of small children, is that which was once done for free—often by slaves—within the confines of the household. Precisely because it is so important, so close to us, so basic, so bound up with home and nurture, it is considered to be of less importance than that which is done in public, such as garbage collecting.” [emphasis mine]

Basically, I’ve just fallen into our patriarchal culture’s trap, leading me to treat feminine things as less-than masculine things (like how I hated wearing pink until Mab started convincing me to wear it, and I discovered that I actually did like it, or the rest of the whole “ugh, girls” thing I had going on through most of high school and college).

Second, I’m treating my own writing as a hobby and not as work on the same level as the homemaking things. This seems paradoxical—my writing is public (in aspiration, at least) and therefore theoretically of greater importance than the things I do in private! But until I got that check, I was unable to put any kind of dollar sign on my writing. I can do a cost comparison of day care for B versus staying home with him, or the amount of money I save by making dinner every night instead of eating out, or making homemade crackers or granola bars instead of buying an equivalent version at the grocery, but not with writing. In fact, writing takes me away from doing those very things—in some sense, it costs me money to write. It’s hard for me—as someone who has always been notoriously bad at spending money on myself, even back in high school—to justify that cost.

And really, it wasn’t the check itself that did it. It was my friend Heather who found it in the magazine, on her own, and posted it on Facebook with a comment about how much she enjoyed it. I realized that more people have read that little essay than have read anything I published in grad school, and that the editor (someone who doesn’t know me and has never met me) thought it was worth the cost to her publication to have my essay there instead of any number of other wonderful submissions. Something about my words connected with other people in a way that they haven’t in the past.

It seems like I shouldn’t be able to value both of these kinds of work at the same time—one of them is going to have to be sacrificed in favor of the other.

But right before her discussion of the word “menial,” Kathleen Norris also said that

“We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing, and even ecstasy, but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are, not where we wish we were. We must look for blessings to come from unlikely, everyday places—out of Galilee, as it were—and not in spectacular events, such as the coming of a comet (…) Even if we do not make such glorious poems [as the one by Margaret Gibson quoted above] out of our ordinary experiences, arranging Easter lilies or making salad, we are free to contemplate both emptiness and fullness, absence and presence in the everyday circumstances of our lives (…) We can become aware of and limit our participation in activities that do not foster the freedom of thought that poetry and religious devotion require; I cannot watch television, for example, and write a poem. I might be inspired by something I hear or see on television, particularly in news interviews, but this is rare. The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread, and doing laundry.” [emphasis mine]

I think the baking and the writing and the laundry and the revising can support each other, and the more I value the things I create, whether they are eaten or read or worn, the more they will add value to each other.