My Feminist Day

Edit: I realized that the motivation for this post was buried in the middle of a REALLY long list of bullet points. It is this: “Found out that my feminist credentials had been revoked on account of high heels.”

Is this a feminist life, with my chickens and my blog and my unpublished writing and my excessive education? Am I feminine enough? Am I Mom enough? (1) Am I feminist enough? Hippie enough? Organic enough? Have I lost my mind, my will, and my agency and fallen prey to some vast corporate patriarchal conspiracy?

Or am I just doing the best I can in a finite world with the resources I have and accepting the reality that somebody has to make dinner and sometimes that has to be me. (2)

Here is a summary of my day (to the best of my memory):

• Something magical happened (that happens nearly every morning) and my husband got the kids ready for school, made the coffee and lunches. I did my morning pages, because I’m a complete freaking idiot in the morning, and the family as a whole has asked me not to “help” with mornings any more except in cases of dire emergency. (win!)
• I lay awake considering the fact that I had completely forgotten the embodiment problem in my post about consciousness. Figured out the problem with my menus and made a mental note to fix them. Got up to discover my son had a cough and was using it as an excuse for “needing” a movie at 8:30 in the morning. (“I need distracting, Mummy.”)
• Drank coffee while discussing things with said child, attempting to provide the distraction without conceding to the morning movie. Eventually gave up and resorted to Diego. Lots and lots of Diego
• Fixed menus. Wrote about the importance of listening to others, using a metaphor from condensed matter physics. Thought about the conclusions from my  senior thesis. Still not convinced my supervisor was right about what we were looking at.
• Got out son’s birth certificate so that I can get his passport so that we can do our Vermont trip this summer. Realized I would probably lose it and put it back into the filing cabinet.
• Paid bills online.
• Remembered that I have forgotten to register for next week’s meditation retreat. Left message with the registration person at the centre.
• Took shower.
• Put on laundry. Found costume cat ears in the pile, put them on head.
• Contacted the most brilliant and fabulous Amanda Farough to talk palette, fonts, and design.
• Attempted to integrate my amazon store with my new website. Found out I need to modify the code. Will have to take another look when I am less distracted.
• Blew bubbles on deck. Popped bubbles. Declared, “Glycerin is cheap. There’s no excuse for bad bubble solution.” (3)
• Made lunch. (4)
• Read car magazines in an attempt to answer the constant question, “how can I get around without destroying everything and blowing the budget?” Spent a brief period considering the human powered vehicle solution and rejecting it because of a lack of roof. Thought again about learning to weld.
• Listened to two classes on marketing for authors.
• Cleaned the kitchen
• Made bagels.
• Cleaned the kitchen again.
• Noodled around on Facebook and Twitter. Found out that my feminist credentials had been revoked on account of high heels.
• Read article critiquing other article that declared that women who wear high heels are tools of the patriarchy. Realized I hadn’t worn my favourite shoes in ages and put them on to see whether they were still comfortable.
• Hung out laundry wearing high heels.
• Picked up child with pinched finger. (still unclear on how he pinched his finger while pouring milk)
• Looked in mirror and saw that I was still wearing the ears, was dressed in a sort of snazzy top, and was the epitome of what was being mocked in the extraordinarily funny video about housework I watched the other day.
• Demanded that uninjured child take photographic evidence for the purpose of self mockery.

• Discovered that when you get a short person to take your picture, the foreshortening makes you look like a giant. RAHR! AM I MOM ENOUGH NOW!?!
• Wrote blog post.
• Chased chicken off deck. Again.
• |:
• Finished writing blog post. (Wait. This is self-referential. I’m caught in an infinite loop!)
• Made programming joke.  : ||
• Made music joke.

In a moment of seriousness, I’m going to quote the illustrious (if fictional) Claire Huxtable, whom I remember watching in my teen years. When a young woman challenged whether she was feminist enough, she said, “I punched my feminist ticket the day I walked in the door of that law school. And nobody gets to take that away from me.”

I get to be a feminist because I said so. And I deny the existence of a right way of declaring, “My life as a woman is a wholly human life.” Whether or not I wear lipstick (I do) or high heels (see evidence above) or shave my legs (I don’t) or have kids (I do) or put them in daycare (I do) or stay home with them (I do, but it’s sort of by accident… but I think it might be a good idea now that I’ve done it for a few years) or study engineering, physics, and poststructural thought (I did) or do my own housework, raise my own vegetables, make my own pickles, (5) or take a women’s studies course (I did that, too.)

I will continue to challenge the intersecting systems of oppression that mean we still have to answer these questions. I will make the choices I can make, rail against the ones I can’t, recognize my extraordinarily privileged position in a world in which simply being born female can still be a death sentence, and hold onto The F word because the fight ain’t over and I’m pretty sure that there are Republicans who secretly think that letting women vote and own property was a mistake.

I’m the one I have to look in the eye each morning, and I am feminist enough for me.

Damn. Dinner didn’t make itself while I was ranting…

 

Woohoo! I took so long editing that my husband got home and made dinner and now all that’s needed is a salad. (6)

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1. I wish I could hire that voice-over guy who does the truck commercials for that one… And I know one of the women from Time Magazine. And she’s awesome to stand up and take that flak. And Time magazine sucks for that headline. And that’s all I’m ever going to say about that.
2. I would just like to add that last week, when I had been writing all day, and my husband got home, he said, “Do you have a plan for dinner?” and I said, “Yes. My plan is that somebody else will make it.” And he said, “Alrighty, then,” and got to work.
3. Bad engineering bugs me. Especially bad engineering of toys. No excuse.
4. Kraft dinner, in case you want to know. Also, in  case it ever comes up, if you run out of butter, KD made with olive oils sucks.
5. My husband makes the jam in our family. I buy the cars. It works for us, although it confuses the sales guys when he doesn’t know what kind of car we’re looking at.
6. If you still have the chance, get a partner who cooks. Seriously. It rocks.