Restless natives provide rich grist for the philosophical mill. . .
According to a recent book review by Anne Crittenden in The American Prospect*, “the natives” are restless again. Who are the natives? Oh, the usual suspects—masses of fretful women caught up in the thick of their adult lives, whether they stay-at-home or work outside of it, whether they write books for a living or just blog about living. (*If you'd like to read the full article, but don't want to pay for a subscription, tell me. As a subscriber, I can email the article to you.) Crittenden writes:
For the past several months there has been an extraordinary ferment in the media over the topic of motherhood. Hundreds of books, newspapers and magazine articles, talk shows and websites have been buzzing with a new version of a very old question: What do women want? Updated, the question is: What do mothers want? Why are they so plagued with guilt and anxiety, so unclear about their place in the overall scheme of things?
Why so much ferment just now? As Rayne pointed out, not long ago, a generational shift is taking place. Each new generation coming of age will always want to have its say on age-old preoccupations. And good for them! According to A.C. Grayling, “a civilized society is one which never ceases having a discussion with itself about what human life should best be.”
What human life should best be. . .
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There is, evidently, on the pages of this blog, evidence of some “disconent”. A friend says that if I am that unhappy, I should seek professional help, (thereby missing the point: blogging is help.) I was fairly stunned by the statement, never having thought of myself as a particularly unhappy person, though it turns out, according to a recent article in the New York Times Magazine, I may be just unhappy enough to think analytically, for myself. Can I help it if I’ve always felt that having an adversarial relationship with culture at large provides a good dash of spice in an otherwise bland existence?
It is time, however, to think even more analytically. I have admitted on these electronic pages that an underlying resentment niggles at me and I have always been hard-pressed, (out of laziness? ineptiutde? lack of perspective? too much perspective?), to identify it, thereby relegating it unintentionally to the odious classification of “problem with no name”. I suppose one could call it a “malaise” but that is as lazy and hazy as the word itself. And if the cure for modern malaise is popping a Prozac, I’m having none of it. It would seem to me a better cure would be to 1) understand the cause of my discontent 2) give the cause a name, and 3) overcome it, insofar as I am able.
I am not alone in this pursuit, at least not in the pursuit of the first step. Crittenden, who no doubt knows way more women than I do, says that “mothers struggle valiantly to find a framework or story line that coherently explains the causes of their discontent.” Well, there you go. I didn’t title this blog Struggle in a Bungalow Kitchen just because I couldn’t get the souffle to pouf up properly (it did) or the cupcakes to turn out fabulously (they didn't.)
I can’t speak for all struggling mothers; won’t even try. The root causes of such discontent are no doubt as varied as there are female individuals, though we can see some general trends—in the impossible standards of the “new momism” or in the whining over loss of economic benefits & professional prestige & ego soothing for those who “opt-out”.
But I never bought into the new momism; have, in fact, hankered for an old momism (which is far less busy & anxious). Nor did I ever have any prestigious profession to “opt-out” of. So what’s eating away at me?
Probably just a few centuries of modern history. . .
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I think that the roots of my own particular problem are deep, growing all the way down to the core of the Industrial Age, passing through the buried detritus of two world wars, winding around the underground cables of the mass media, and disturbing the jungles of feminism; the resulting trunk of the matter is, quite simply, that I was not brought up by my culture to value the work of creating a home. The message, spoken and unspoken, throughout my impressionable youth was that value lay elsewhere: Get a good job. Be economically successful. Yeah, you'll probably have a child or two along the way, but you don't have to be the one to take care of them.
Which, I am now coming to understand, was not really a message best suited to a little girl who was always dressed up like a peasant woman trying to feed her stuffed animal children under joyously hardscrabble conditions. So yes, I’m a little angry about it (though not at anyone in particular, certainly not at my parents, who tried to teach me the value hard work itself), but angry enough, to continue the analogy, to uproot my tree, haul it around for awhile and replant it in less polluted ground—a bit of Herculean task, but assuming that the mind is infinitely fertile, I think it can be done.
John Seymour’s book on the self-sufficient life hammered home so much I’ve read and instinctually agreed with this past year: “The most creative thing that anybody can do in this world is to make a real home.” (My emphasis.)
It's got to start by valuing the work. Seymour recalls:
I once knew an old lady who lived by herself in the Golfen Valley of England. She was one of the happiest people I have met. She described to me all the work she and her mother used to do when she was a child: washing on Monday, butter-making on Tuesday, marken on Wednesday, and so on. “It all sounds like a lot of hard work,” I said to her. “Yes, but nobody ever told us then,” she said. “Told you what?” “Told us there was anything wrong with work!” Today “work” has become a dirty word, and most people would do anything to get out of it. To say that an invention is labor-saving is the highest praise, but it never seems to occur to anyone that the work might have been enjoyable.”
Or spiritually-satisfying, or animalistically pleasurable. (I am greedy. I mean to have all these satisfactions and all these pleasures.)
And yet, I can’t disregard myself, can’t lay waste to the only tools my entire upbringing has given me: words and a liberal arts education. Can’t give myself over entirely to household chores, without the emotional outlet of writing, without the intellectual outlet of history. One grows weary of having an adversarial relationship with oneself. And no one says I have to.
All I can do is work myself to the bone—in front of the page, in front of the hearth—and whining is not allowed for the choices I’ve made. But I reserve the right to whine about my ignorant hands, if I'm prepared to eradicate the ignorance, and I reserve the right to wonder, like Camille Paglia, if such a word-centric education is good for everyone.
Now, my problem with no name, still doesn’t have a name, but I am that much closer in understanding that it has to do with the spiritual dimension of domestic physical labor, something which the Shakers and the Buddhists have always understood, but which Betty Friedan, apparently, did not.
10:53:07 PM 
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