Read My Lips!
Hello out there. I do not exist for the convenience of other people. The other day I joked with a few friends who are stuck in the same place that my indentured servitude began in 1975 and still has no end date. At what point does the fare for my passage into married life get stamped paid in full?
Why am I treated like furniture? During the years when I traveled and held a job outside the house, I hung a sign that read: your mother does not work here, please pick up after yourself. Nobody living under that roof ever paid it the slightest attention.
I am a person apart from the housekeeper, the personal shopper, the wife, the mother, and the kids' grandmother. Someone once told me to draft a proposal describing what I actually want to do with my life. The suggestion left me frozen.
To my family I have always been a riddle, and not only the one I was born into but the one I live with now. It goes back to childhood and my father. He drove me to activities and collected me afterward, yet he never had any idea what happened in between. I played the lead in my senior class production, and as far as he could tell I might have had two lines. The whole thing baffled him. He paid for my life and usually tracked where the money went, though the reason behind each expense stayed hazy to him.
Isn't it past time the two of us began living our own lives instead of borrowing someone else's? Do you still see where you were headed? Did you ever? My mother pictured me as a wife and a mother, because that was her own role, and she filled it well. She handled the basics and then some: she served as a room mother, sewed, and kept both a vegetable patch and a flower garden going.
Step aside, Kim Kardashian. My turn has arrived. I am done going without so that everyone around me can have what they want. I want credit for what I can do, the freedom to do what I please, and the room to go where I choose. Words come easily to me. I have an eye for how things look, I can carry a tune, I make people laugh, and I have an education. Keeping myself at the back of the stove has gone on long enough.
This house is my space as well. Advice from others is fine with me, but the last word ought to be mine. I am the one who lives here, logs the most hours here, looks at these walls, and is supposed to draw some spark from them. Instead the place keeps reciting the list of chores undone and all the ways it has slipped. The power to change any of it feels like it was never handed to me.
The battle for women's liberation is still unfinished. I was present at its start, and I will keep the date to myself. I could fill an entire separate piece on what it means to be a wage slave, handing over most of your years to goals that belong to somebody else.