What We Said

I’ve just stumbled upon an “informative game” presented with sounds effects at the BBC Woman’s Hour webpage, and wanted to share it, because I’m not sure how I feel about it.

You’re supposed to enter your name and your husband’s, then estimate the amount of time you spend on several types of chores you do every week, on top of child care and paid work, and rate how you feel about each chore. Then estimate the same amounts for your spouse.

The tone is decisively aggressive and war-mongering: “Woman’s Hour reports from the last battleground for equality – the home.”, and the noise makes it sound like a medieval turnament.

I could not resist trying it, of course! It was quite exhaustive in chores categories, which made me realize how specialized my husband and I are, each responsible for one type of activity (especially cooking for me, and laundry for him) and not sharing activities together by turn. But I guess I grossly overestimated the time I spent for some (cooking especially) the first time around, and I had no idea how enjoyable most of them are to my husband. Then I took the test a second time and I totally overestimated the time my husband spent on the laundry, an activity which I dislike and find always too long and boring.

As a whole, the results said that my husband does slightly more than I do at home, and is less happy about it (because of the laundry bia). But I think it would be interesting to have his advice on the matter.

The Chore Wars page presents lots of small audio topics which are quite interesting. I’d love to hear what you think of them and discuss it here.

It’s so thrilling to see posts coming up on this blog. Many thanks to Litlove for encouraging us to write here again! As for changes in my life, who would have guessed five years ago when we last wrote here that I would now have a baby of my own. Maybe some people could have guessed that, but I certainly wouldn’t have. In fact, I know of only one friend who wasn’t surprised when I announced I wanted to have or was going to have a baby. I had always said that I would have a child if I was certain I really wanted one, but that at the moment I just didn’t have that desire. Why in this day and age have a baby unless you really, really, really want to? (It should be that simple, at least, even though the reality isn’t that simple for many women.) I didn’t want to have a baby for a long time, until all the sudden I did want one. And Hobgoblin and I, in typical fashion, made up our minds during the course of one conversation to try to get pregnant — no agonizing indecision for us — and here we are.

There were lots of reasons I wanted a baby, once I realized I did, but one of the most important factors was that I have a really great situation for raising a child. I’ve known all my life what hard work it is to be a parent (I’m the oldest of seven children), and I haven’t ever wanted to undertake all that work. But my models for parenting, my own parents, live a very different life than the one I have now. I could never, ever be a (happy) housewife and full-time mother, but I don’t have to: I’m able to raise my son alongside my husband, sharing the work, instead of doing what my mother did, and being the full-time caretaker. I don’t think I would have made the decision to have a child if I didn’t have the flexible job I have now, if Hobgoblin didn’t have a flexible job as well, if he weren’t willing and happy to do a lot of the parenting work, if I didn’t feel financially stable, if I didn’t feel as though I could keep up my other interests (reading, cycling, writing) while raising our child, even if it means having less time and energy for those interests. I’m so grateful to be in the place I am in now and to be able to make the choice I did about having a child. How many women throughout history have been in a similar situation?

And the last (almost) two years have been very good ones. I am lucky to have a great husband and a child who is not only healthy, but good-tempered and sweet. I will admit that one thing that makes my situation so great is that I am not and have never been particularly ambitious about my working life. I read about Courtney’s struggles with the missed promotion and I get incredibly angry for her sake, and I think about how hard it would be for me if I experienced something similar. But I just don’t have the drive to struggle for status at work. I’m a tenured professor and the only place for me to go next is to become department chair, which is just more work for not much compensation and is only temporary, or to try to become a dean or some other administrative type. I have friends who would like to follow this path. But all I want is to keep teaching. Yes, it did take some drive and ambition to get to the place I am now, but I’ve always known I would be happy to reach a certain level and go no further. I have no more promotions ahead of me, and I don’t care. I think this feeling is genuine and not some internalized message from society about how women shouldn’t be ambitious. I’m genuinely not motivated by career. If I were, having a child would be much more complicated. And the fact that it would be more complicated is enough to make me furious on behalf of all the women who are more ambitious than I am.

What I like, though, is the struggle to carve out time for the things that aren’t a part of my job. I am so much happier striving for the things that don’t earn me money (or that cost me money: cycling). When I have had loads of time on my hands, I haven’t been happy. Instead, I need some free time but not too much and also some pressures to create a shape to my day. So I’ve been trying to keep up with my cycling, although I have been only partially successful at this. I go weeks happily getting up early to fit a ride in, and then I quit riding for weeks because school has gotten too busy or the weather is too bad or both. I’ve been reading regularly and steadily with my precious evening hours, although in order to read as much as I would like I forgo watching movies or television and stay in most evenings. But thank God I have my evenings free; it makes such a difference. I’ve been only a sporadic blogger, partly because I don’t want to spend my reading time doing anything else, and partly because I don’t have the time or energy to participate in the blogging community as I used to. I feel bad about not leaving comments on other blogs. I have been writing book reviews for other sites now and then, though, and that has been fun. I’m thinking now that I would like to use my blog for informal posts, lists and book chat and reading round-ups, and save my more formal reviewing for other sites. But my feelings about my blog change all the time.

So that’s me. It’s good to be here again.

It’s five years since we last posted here. I loved this joint writing space, so I hope we can revitalize it. My blogging has wholly dropped off for a variety of reasons (see below), and I do miss long-form blogging, as Emily calls it, though my social media attention span is better suited to tweeting and Facebook posts.

In the last five years, I returned to work full-time. This is not easy in Germany where primary schools happily send kids home at 12:30 for the hot lunch that they presume will be cooked by a stay-at-home mama, and high schools are not much better. To the chagrin of many of my German friends, I found a private school (elitist! full of children from rich families with behavioral problems!) that feeds and looks after my kids till 4pm. School is the nanny that allows me to work, and while there are a lot of rich kids with behavioral problems, there are a lot of normal kids with mothers who need to work. Enough balance to justify the outlay, and I get to spend my day with grown-ups, earn a salary, use some of my skills and feel as if I am contributing something. I also want to be a working mom role model to my children. (Note to self: complain less about your job at home.)

The other thing that changed in the last five years is that I managed to shepherd the novel that I was working on while writing here to publication. That has been a wonderful process, and while Balthasar was published last year in Germany, the absolute highlight was taking the English version on a four-city book tour to South Africa in June. It was wonderful to read to South African audiences, see reviews in South African newspapers, and see my novel on bookshelves there.

Both my publishers are small independent presses and I love them both to death. Both are headed by gutsy feminist women who trying to swing against the tide of big six publishing (or is it four now? can’t keep up) and publish good books that don’t necessarily have mass appeal. They have made tiny cracks in the monolith, and for that, I am eternally grateful. I am now working on the second novel in the series and am on a very tight deadline to provide something to Else, my German publisher, by January. Christmas will be a mere blip in my world.

Has anyone else noticed how feminism has gone mainstream in the last five years? I followed many great feminist blogs and it has been fascinating to watch those voices get picked up by large newspapers such as the Guardian. I am still utterly depressed by the trolls and admire the energy of the women who take them on (as we all should), but I think the prominence of the public feminist discussion is a great thing.

That’s it from me, folks. I so look forward to hearing what you’ve been up to.

I was quite enthusiastic when Litlove contacted me to rekindle the “What We Said” blog. After all, conversations about feminism are hardly ever over. In those last five years, I can’t say that the number of female top managers in big companies has increased in France (not that I know of), that the number of female MPs has increased in the national assemblies, and even that the sexist-racist “jokes” against powerful women have disappeared.

But then Litlove asked “what have you been up to in these 5 years?” and I found myself wondering. It all went by in a blur. There’s no shortage of events or ideas that crossed my mind related to gender or feminism, so I might allude to them here and develop them in later posts. But to sum those 5 years up, no wonder some call it the “rush hour of life”.

My first son is now 6 (going on 13 sometimes) and I have had another baby, another boy. The second time around, except for the birth which was quite difficult, felt a lot better, a lot more self-evident (proof that it’s experience and not nature that led the way in my case). We trusted ourselves a lot more, I didn’t agonize over sleep patterns, and we slipped into a routine much earlier. The only regret is that I didn’t breastfeed but for a week due to birth difficulties. When he was 3 months old, at the end of the maternity leave, as many (but not all) French women do, I got back to work full-time. To be honest I don’t really experience that guilt that I read about in a lot of American (or German) blogs about motherhood. I can’t really imagine staying home full-time (even if it was financially realistic). I take a bit more time off, and cuddling with the baby seems more like an evening / weekend / holidays privilege. I have an acute sense of how fast he’s growing out of his infant / baby days and into toddler phase, knowing that there won’t probably have another baby. It’s a bittersweet feeling, but I am enjoying babyhood a lot more too. Having two boys at home makes things rather noisy and rowdy, especially in a typically small Parisian flat. Sometimes, the realization that I won’t (probably ever) have a daughter gripes me and makes me wonder what I have missed.

Job-wise, we haven’t moved overseas, and the economic prospects in our respective industries have made this dream quite difficult to reach. But I had reached total exhaustion / boredom / disillusion with my financial job and so I jumped ship rather abruptly. Within a few weeks, as I’d heard of a job opening in my department in the IT field, I applied and got the job! The big caveat is that I had to keep my financial job for as long as they’d find a replacement, which they felt no special pressure for. It was both exciting and exhausting to juggle everything at that time (it was before the baby, needless to say). Part of the reasons why I got the job without any experience or special knowledge was that it is a fast-developing business that nobody in my company knew much anything about. I work on projects like e-learning, digital solutions for trainings, as well as more traditional tasks like platform administration, project management etc.. Partly, I have to thank the internet and the blog world to have opened to me windows I’d never have considered before. Needless to say, this is a heavily male professional environment.

My writing life has been much reduced due to all these changes. I still struggle to find time writing other things than blogposts, but I keep hoping that it will get better the older the baby gets. Strangely, I have major insecurities about writing fiction. I am in such a turmoil myself that creating imaginary people who have their own struggles feels a little useless and vain. I am quite aware of the irony that I spend most of my free time reading about imaginary people who have struggles very different from my own, but I haven’t yet founnd a way around my doubts.

So here it is. What about you, sisters?

Today, I bought a doll for my toddler. My son, actually. I’m actually embarrassed to say that it felt strange. In theory, I’m all for gender-neutral toys. Mr. Smithereens and I share that concern to educate our son without gender prejudices. When I was pregnant, I bought babygros in white and yellow, because I was so annoyed to be offered only pink and blue ones. But when it comes to buying toys and receiving toys from other people, Baby Smithereens (now 15 month old) got little trucks, construction bricks and little trains, but no dolls. Needless to add that the truck driver is a man.

The funny thing is, he kind of made me buy the doll, it’s not me who decided to buy that toy for the sake of principles. He’s looked after together with another little boy of his age and a “big” 5 year old sister, who’s very much into pink tutus, baby dolls, Disney princesses and Hello Kitty. The brother must have learnt from her because I saw him giving a toy bottle to a doll, and my son got jealous.

In the shop today, in the range for toddlers (18m to 3y) there was a blond Caucasian female doll, an Asian one, an African one, and a gender-neutral baby doll wearing diapers and a babygro. This is the one I got. I was a bit disappointed that no doll was actually male. Of course, I didn’t really expect it, but still. And it’s not as if I was going to buy an action figure anyway. The salesperson (a woman) smiled when she saw us choosing the doll, but I can’t figure out what she thought.

This is not a very highbrow approach, but I’d be interested to know about other people’s experience when trying to buy “the right toys”.