ever-fixed mark

I’m off to the airport to pick up my parents, who are visiting for a long weekend. They currently live in Florida. All week, they’ve been calling and asking about the weather. A few times they even said, “We’re worried about the cold.” Worried?

Hey, Mom and Dad. WE WON’T MAKE YOU SLEEP OUTSIDE. PACK A SWEATER.

We’re going to take advantage of the free, competent babysitting to spend a night in Kennebunkport. We’re going back to the inn with, uh, the floor show. Maybe we’ll run into Bar again.

Speaking of the Bushes, I just saw the most awesome headline on Yahoo: “Hezbollah Leader to Bush: ‘Shut Up.’” I suppose tomorrow’s headline will read: “No, You Shut Up!”

Another curious headline popped up on CNN this morning, although it was 6:30 a.m. and I was on a treadmill, so I may have hallucinated it. It read, “Haiti Front-Runner Ahead in Election.” Well, it would be strange if one of the last-place guys were ahead, wouldn’t it?

When I was working on my master’s thesis on Ayn Rand, I finally bought a copy of The Feminine Mystique. I figured if I was going to write feminist criticism, I had better have a sense of the history of the movement. It was interesting to contrast Friedan, who was trying to throw off the yoke of domesticity, with Rand, who was trying to throw off the yoke of Communism. After reading Rand’s books and her biography (by her former disciple, Barbara Branden), I doubt Rand ever gave five minutes’ thought to whether she was embodying her proper social role. She was too busy escaping from Russia, bossing around her pretty househusband, and building her empire to worry if her toilets were clean.

One part of The Feminine Mystique did resonate with me, though. I had already given up on housekeeping as a vocation. My mother was always trying to get me interested in cooking or cleaning, and I would have none of it. Housekeeping bored and horrified me. I remember snapping at my mother, “When I grow up I’m never going to clean my house! I’m going to have a housecleaner!” She snapped back, “Well, then, you had better plan on marrying a very rich man.”

When I grew up, I discovered you don’t have to marry rich to have a house cleaner; even a single woman (gasp!) in possession of a moderate income could afford it. So for years I muddled along letting someone else clean every two weeks, and occasionally rinsing a dish or tidying a room in between time. This worked very well when I was single, but add a husband, a house, a dog, and a kid to the equation, and it quickly became apparent that something more was called for. Unfortunately, although you don’t have to be rich to have someone else scrub your toilets, you do have to be very rich indeed to have someone else pick up after you on a daily basis, do all your shopping, schedule all your appointments, and maintain your house and cars.

Enter Flylady.

Flylady is a web site devoted to housekeeping. It is somewhat anti-feminist in that it is targeted to the female of the house, thereby appearing to assume that housekeeping is the woman’s responsibility, and that the woman is a stay-at-home mom. (The web site says that the system is for anyone who needs it–men, singles, working women, etc.–but the e-mails and products are definitely SAHM-skewed, with large doses of vague spirituality and self-help.) Yet Flylady is pro-feminist, too, because it’s not obsessed with domestic perfection. The goal is to keep the house running smoothly to save your own sanity and to make you more efficient, not for the sake of outward appearances. Flylady is essentially project management techniques applied to the home.

I have been thinking about Flylady and feminism ever since I read about the study claiming that women who work still shoulder a disproportionate amount of the house and child care. At our house, Husband takes his fair share of responsibility for the dog and baby, but I’m still in charge of the house, even though he does his fair share of work.

Is it a setback for feminism that women are still primarily responsible for house and child care, even when they work outside the home? Probably.

Am I a traitor to feminism if I, in my own home, am primarily responsible for the house? Are you a traitor if you’re a stay-at-home mom, or if you’re a working mom who is the primary caregiver for your child? I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m obligated to live my life out of the Feminist Political Correctness Manifesto; there has to be more than one valid way of running a house or raising a child.

But still…if we all fall in with traditional roles, is it really our choice or are we just internalizing what we’ve been taught? Bitch Ph.D. has a provocative (in a good way) post on this topic. She notes that “the person whose job it is to monitor [the equality of labor division] is the person who has the least power. And in most cases, that’s the woman.”

Is management less powerful than labor?

Edited to add: I just saw Judith Warner’s column in the New York Times, dealing with some of the same themes (requires subscription).

Yesterday, I ran into my friend C at the beach, and she said, “Don’t forget, tomorrow’s the Frigid Fiver.”

For two years in a row I, in a fit of optimism brought on by fresh New Year’s resolutions, have promised to run the February Frigid Fiver with C. Last year, I forgot all about it, and I was hoping to repeat that performance. The words “February,” “New England,” and “road race” in combination do not conjure up a happy picture.

But this year, after publicly declaring my intention to Lose Weight, what could I do? I had to go.

Because of the freakish weather patterns, it wasn’t even that frigid. In fact, with temperatures hovering around 50, it was more like the Unseasonably Mild Fiver. I was wearing shorts and a long-sleeved t-shirt, and at the half-mile mark I was already beginning to wish I’d worn short sleeves.

We fell in quickly with a bunch of new recruits from our county sheriff’s department. They were wearing rain pants, dark jackets, and baseball caps; I figured they wouldn’t be running too fast for fear of heat exhaustion, and I was right. They kept us at a nice, steady pace, marked by a few military-style chants:

My grandmother’s ninety-one!
She does PT just for fun!
My grandmother’s ninety-two!
She does PT better than you.

Anyone who knows me well will be able to anticipate that by the time we got to “My grandmother’s ninety-three, she does PT better than…” I was correcting their grammar to “better than I.” Some habits die hard, even when on a five-mile run.

The sheriff and his sergeant kept circling back to get their newbies, which was encouraging. Although C and I had made a pact to walk if we needed to, I was motivated to run the whole way. I finished at a respectable (for me) 53:45. I even finished ahead of a number of the sheriff’s recruits — not just the 58-year-old woman, but a couple of the strapping young-twenties men and women, too.

It’s comforting to know that if I ever commit a heinous crime in this county, I can outrun about a third of the new deputies.

On the other hand, if I’m a victim of a crime, that might not be so comforting.

A lot of people claim they don’t know how they put on weight. They subsist on a diet of arugula and celery juice, then catch a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial on TV, and they gain twenty pounds. Well, I know exactly how I got so fat. I ate my way here. I don’t even have a slow metabolism. It’s fairly fast, but I eat to keep up with it: appetizers and ice cream and cookies and wine and Boston Cream doughnuts. (Do you have Dunkin’ Donuts in your region of the country? They were popular in the ’seventies in Pennsylvania, then they kind of fell out of favor. Then I moved to Massachusetts, where the Double-D is practically a state religion. Husband and I have started calling a drive-through run “services”; coffee and doughnuts are, of course, “Communion.”)

I have never been skinny, but I have always had a body that looked pretty much the same whether I was up or down 10 or even 20 pounds. I carry most of it in my abdomen, which can usually be camouflaged, except in a bathing suit. I have always felt fat, even when I wasn’t. I think I must have porked up a little in elementary school, leading to some teasing from other kids and anxious admonishments from my parents, so even when I got to high school I felt very self-conscious. I look back now at photos, and think of a typical day: cross-country practice, marching with the band, cheerleading practice, a game of tennis, working, studying…I could not possibly have been fat. Could I? I definitely wasn’t as skinny as the other cheerleaders, even though I tried desperately to develop an eating disorder. I think my body image must have been completely distorted. I remember what I weighed back then, and I remember what my body was capable of doing–seven-mile runs! High kicks! Something called an “illusion,” where I twirled around like a pinwheel!–and I don’t think I could have been that fat.

Well, pity I never enjoyed it. Over the last few years — since moving to Massachusetts, in fact — my weight has been creeping upward, holding, and then creeping some more. Every once in a while I start a new exercise plan in an effort to kick my metabolism into higher gear. I’ve had to face facts: I’ve been exercising steadily for a year, I can run five miles, my cardiovascular output is phenomenal, I can hold most yoga poses…but the weight is not budging. Fat is getting in the way (literally, figuratively) of things I want to do, clothes I want to wear, and how I want to see myself.

I have to eat less.

I am not a big fan of diets, except when I was in the Peace Corps when claiming to be on a “regime” was a convenient excuse for escaping the molokia proffered by my hosts. (The early Peace Corps years, incidentally, were the only time I didn’t feel fat, but I had a little help from my friends shigella, giardia, and entamoeba histolytica. Good times!) To juggle this whole work/life/baby/dog thing, my life is pretty regimented; the thought of imposing a bunch of rules on my food intake makes me want to weep.

I have to do it.

I’m going to try to tackle the food issue like I’ve tackled the house. It’s just a matter of substituting good habits for bad. Water instead of wine; apples instead of ice cream; coffee instead of doughnuts.

Forgive me, Dunkin Donuts, for I have sinned…

Kitchen, morning. Aitch is finishing breakfast; I am loading the dishwasher.

AITCH: Mommy, burp!

ME: Did you burp, honey?

AITCH: Yeah.

ME: What do you say when you burp?

AITCH (helpfully, imitating burping sound): buuuuuhhhhhhhp

ME: No, I mean what do you say after…oh, never mind.