Sunday, June 11, 2006

Staying at Home

Yo, happy monday, blogsylvania.  Hope you had a fulfilling weekend.  Mine started early when I went home sick from work on friday.  I did have the energy, however, to go to our friends’ house that night and be hosted for a fabulous supper.  Added bonus: they gave us about a jillion great items of babywear that their baby can’t wear anymore, with a few awesome toys to boot.  I spent most of saturday cooking and cleaning, and most of sunday doing laundry and going out to the park for the free Cake concert.  I do like me some Cake, but it was a summer day in san francisco, which meant it was cold, foggy and windy.  We had the baby along and left after about six songs - even though they launched into our favorite song of theirs (is this love?) just as soon as we were too far away to turn around and go back.  Whatever; I definitely got my money’s worth.  We had tasty viet take-out for supper and now it’s now.  The baby is asleep, I think, and it’s time to reorient myself for the workweek. 

...which leads me to think that it’s time to post this little bitta drivel about going to work.  Hope you enjoy it.  I didn’t at the time, but I do in retrospect.

I needed that bus ride.  Morning came too early, and I was not at my sharpest.  Forty minutes of meditative isolation was the prescription, music in my ears and landscape scrolling past me, the details of my life fading away so I could focus more sharply once I disembarked downtown.  But such was not to be.

At the stop, I encountered my occasional transit pal.  She worked near my office, lived near my home; we rode the same line frequently enough to have introduced ourselves and had a few conversations.  Not much more than that did we share in common, but for some reason, that morning she felt compelled to capitalize on it and strike up a conversation. 

We rarely had much to discuss – her roommates, my family, our respective jobs.  But today she seemed pensive and our conversation steered toward a particular friend of hers.  “Old friends – friends from college,” she explained to me, though she was barely in her late 20s and college wasn’t that far back for her.  “We studied feminism together, wrote articles together.  She was a real radical.” She cast herself back into her past, on bygone dorm rooms and classes from another era.  “After graduation, we stayed in touch.  She fought for a satisfying career and for wage equality; we’d send books back and forth and have those long phone conversations about paradigm shifts and gender roles and the EEOC.  And I was really happy for her when she told me she’d gotten into a relationship with a guy who shared all this with her.  She said he could talk with her about all the things that were so important to us both.  She told me he could really support her in all those things we’d worked together to achieve.”

She sighed a little, watched the storefronts flash past through greasy smears on the broad window.  “He wanted to go to law school. The best one he got into was in Oregon, so they moved.  He started classes and she got a job in retail, and worked hard – on the corporate level, and on the political level too, till she was the store manager.  And it was a good store,” she assured me, turning her wide eyes on my bleary ones, “with an excellent socially conscious product line that was protective of worker economic interests and gender equity.  Anyway,” she continued, her gaze shifting forward, into the sea of riders sitting ahead of us, “she said she liked it.  It was a good job.  Fulfilling,” she gravely intoned.

And then, a hollowness crept into her voice.  “Her husband – well, they got married.  About two months later she was pregnant.  But she didn’t let it slow her down; she stayed at work through her seventh month.  And then she took off on leave and had a baby shower, and I went up to be there for her.  It was a couple of weekends ago.  I got her a book,” she told me, flashing a glance my way, “on feminist mothering.  What to ask the doctor, how to deal with sexist expectations, breast feeding rights.... It’s a really good book.  I guess.  I mean, I’m not a mom, but it’s by a really well-respected author.  Anyway, she was really tired at her shower.  She said she just didn’t have any energy; she didn’t feel like doing things and she slept all the time.”

“Pretty standard for the third trimester,” I ventured, but it didn’t really slow her down.

“Then she told me that she wasn’t even interested in going back to work.  She was ready to leave her job, her whole career.  She said her husband was going to do really well in law school and make a lot of money, and he could take care of them.  She was ready,” she concluded, “to be a stay-at-home mom.”

And with this, she looked squarely at me, to gauge, I suppose, my response.  Her voice was like a hole out of which she peered at me with abjured loneliness, waiting for me to offer her a rope or a ladder or a strong-armed hand.  All I was able to tell her was, “Typical, I suppose.” It was not the answer she’d been hoping to hear.  Then again, I wasn’t the person she needed to hear it from.

Well, back to work with you then.  I was wrong, the baby is entirely not asleep.  My work begins now, I suppose.