Feminism

When Furniture Moves in the Night

GraceLeave a comment

My dad used to come home in the middle of the night sometimes from work trips.  Trying to be considerate of his sleeping wife and daughters, he would tiptoe through the house – only to bang his shin and nearly take off a toe on the furniture that had moved since the last time he walked through the living room.

When we got older and Mom took it into her head to rearrange the house while Dad was on a trip, Bird and I had to help.

“Why,” we asked, wedging our shoulders under the arm of the couch while she lifted the other end like Wonder Woman, “can’t this wait until Dad is home to help?”

Mom shook her head at us, the upended couch swaying slightly in her grip.  “Girls, if we can do it ourselves – and we can – why wait?  Now, lift with your legs.”  We sighed.

To be fair, two generations of women in my family before her had repositioned furniture while their husbands were away – it was an inherited habit, one that sneakily followed me to college.  Last year, when the Commodore and I were sharing a room, we grew tired of the bunk bed arrangement and decided to unstack the beds.  I texted the Engineer to ask him to come help us move furniture while the Commodore paced out the new arrangement of our room.  The novelty of a fresh room arrangement (and the idea of no longer hitting our heads every time we got in or out of bed) was exciting.

Except the Engineer couldn’t make it.  Maybe this weekend he might be free.

The Commodore and I looked at each other.  And then we started shoving smaller furniture aside to make room for us to lift the upper bunk down from its perch.

Our third roommate’s boyfriend insisted on helping us, because he heard the scraping and sliding from the living room and, as he told his girlfriend, “I want to make sure these two don’t kill themselves.”  But the point was that, regardless of whether or not a Male Personage miraculously appeared to assist us, we felt like moving the furniture, so dammit, we were going to move the furniture.

When we settled down in our newly un-bunked (debunked?) beds that night, I told the Commodore about my parents and my grandparents and rearranging the house in the absence of one’s spouse.  She laughed.

“Of course your mom would do that,” she said.  “Still, it was nice to have help.”  She sat up straighter in her bed and declared, “We are Strong, Independent, 21st Century Women…who are quite happy to let guys do the heavy lifting if they feel so inclined.”

And that’s just what I love.  The lesson that I learned from my mother was not to reject a friend’s help, be they male or female, but rather to not put my life on hold until someone bigger or stronger can come and help me take the next step.  When Dad was home, of course he was roped into helping.  But if the mood struck while he was away, she made my sister and I feel that we didn’t necessarily need a man’s physical strength to get things done.  She showed us how to put towels under the feet of the couch to slide it across hardwood floors, how to come up with innovative ways to take a burst of inspiration and run with it despite potential obstacles.

And, of course, always lift with your legs.

Stuff To Do This Summer

Aside GraceLeave a comment

Pray.

Bible study with Bird.

Study for the GRE.

Enjoy and learn from my new internship.

Do DuoLingo or something to keep up my extremely rusty Spanish.

Maybe learn some basic Italian while I’m at it.

Keep up an exercise routine.

Keep up this blog.

Work on some of my own stories.

Get back in touch with old friends.

Go to a friend’s wedding.

Start research for my thesis.

Speaking of which, should probably get that proposal revised and turned in.

Visit the Engineer.

Visit the Southern Belle.

Learn my way around my new town, including finding a bookshop and coffee place to frequent in my down time.

Start journaling again.

Put on sunscreen.

Drink a lot of coffee.

Be happy.

Feminism and Texting Family Members

Grace1 Comment

“Take your boyfriend with you.”

I had just texted my dad that the teeny-tiny cracks spidering up the side edge of my phone, which hadn’t been a problem up until now, had left a snowflake of glass in the flesh between my forefinger and my thumb yesterday.  He said that the Phone Store should replace it, no problem.  Then my screen flashed again with a second text.

“Take your boyfriend with you.”

Now why should I have to do that?  Why should I have to drag the Engineer along as a buffer so the Phone Store Employees won’t sneer at me and patronizingly tell me that the only way I get a new phone is with a new contract that will (obviously) cost my father millions?

The Engineer, as much as I love him, is useless when it comes to my phone.  He can’t figure out touchscreens to save his life.  He has a flip phone with a QWERTY keyboard and is quite happy with it.  But the Phone Store Employees will not know that.  They will know only that he is a man, and therefore automatically more knowledgeable of technology and money-handling in general and less likely to be trifled with than me, a woman.

Grr.

I don’t blame my dad for this.  Honestly, I’ve never particularly enjoyed going in to try to get someone to replace or repair something for me without an adult there.  But I’ve also grown up around my mother, who can make a grown man turn pale in the face of her righteous indignation when she is dissatisfied.  Not that she flies into a rage if her soup is tepid, but she also isn’t one to back down if something needs to be made right.  As I tentatively step into adulthood, I’m slowly learning to hold my ground and evenly ask for decent treatment and service, the way my mom has my whole life while my dad was off on trips for the airline.  I may be a daddy’s girl in some cases (if I were at home, I would probably barely look up from my laptop long enough to hand Dad my phone to go get it fixed, but that’s mostly because I’m lazy), but here at school, I do have to run my own errands, fill up my own car, take care of my own apartment, etc.  And why shouldn’t that independence of school life extend to getting a warrantied phone replaced?

Furthermore, it’s a sign of a deeper societal issue that Dad didn’t even have to explain why he thought I should take my knight in shining armor with me.  He wasn’t suggesting it as a date idea – our family has some weird ideas about love, but getting a phone replaced is not exactly a typical couples activity – nor was he saying that the Engineer should tag along to learn the ropes of getting Phone Store Employees to listen to him.  The implied subtext, the only underlying message that makes sense as Society has taught us, is that I needed the Engineer, the man in my life in a protective role, to accompany me the same way my other friend did to the mechanic’s last semester, and for the same reason: that I would not be taken seriously on my own.

ADDENDUM: According to the Commodore, the acceptable reason that you should ever have to have a male accompany you anywhere is just in case you need someone to sacrifice in Trial By Combat.  Obviously, since we are Strong, Independent, 21st Century Women, we could handle such a challenge on our own, but it’s much more convenient bringing someone to sacrifice in our stead.  These things happen.

Conversation About Conversation

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I like to joke that typical dinner conversation at my house delves into the Big Questions, discussing Life, The Universe, and Everything.  It’s true that what Bird and I consider normal mealtime chat includes the stigma on mental illness, the treatment of women throughout history, the state of the education system in the US, and so on.  I never knew this kind of thing wasn’t necessarily typical until I began having dinner at friends’ houses and learned that when they talked about their day, they stopped there.  They literally just talked about their day, and maybe what they had planned for the next day, or the weekend, and maybe a funny story from last summer when they all went inner tubing and the youngest dropped her sunglasses and cried.  I mean, we had those conversations too.  (Believe me, there are plenty of stories we love to bring up at the slightest provocation.  Remind me to tell you about the time Dad got a speeding ticket.)

But we also enjoyed going off on extended tangents about abstractions and Important Concepts while our dinners cooled in front of us.

And I am so grateful for that.

My family’s tendency to engage in abnormally esoteric dialogue gave me a foundation for extracting themes from the literature I read in All the English Classes Ever.  It gave me a vocabulary for identifying abstract concepts.  It gave me practice for listening to others and having a Real Discussion as opposed to a shouting match.  And it gave me the mindset that led me to the Writing Center.

My university’s Writing Center became my haven during a semester when things were pretty rough for me.  I found an affirmative place where like-minded people weren’t afraid to have conversations about their enthusiasm for language.  Even though the required job trainings take chunks of valuable Netflix  time out of my evenings, I love them.  I love getting to talk about the importance of body language while working with a student and our desire to change the campus perception of us as a personification of spell check.  It almost feels like spending an evening at home again.

The environment that encourages these conversations is slowly helping me figure out what I want to do with my life.  Not the answer to the perpetual question of What I Want To Do, as in a job, but the values I believe the world needs to see more often and how those should influence my own choices.  If I never talked with anyone about these things, I would probably be facing those looming Life Decisions with even more paralyzing terror than I currently have.  As it is, I am buoyed by the knowledge that somewhere out there are other people who like to have conversations about conversation.

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Mysterious Water Leaks Don’t Care About Feminism

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I came home last night to a squishy floor. My roomie informed me that water had been pooling in our hallway (really more of a smallish space between doorways, but we call it a hallway) ever since she got home, and it was starting to soak through the carpet. As the evening went on, we put down more and more towels, the water spreading until our floor looked like laundry day dumped out on the rug.

In one respect, I was glad we were both girls, because my boyfriend would never have had enough towels to deal with this. (I once had to explain to him what a linen closet was.) Not to stereotype, but girls just tend to accumulate more fabric goods, if only because our relatives don’t know what else to give us for graduation and Christmas.

But toweling needs aside, when we realized we didn’t want to wake up to an entirely flooded apartment, we called – you guessed it – a male friend to come over and look at what was wrong. Our neighbor, who is a friend of ours, stopped by and showed us how to turn off the heating part of the water heater, but he couldn’t turn the valve to stop the water flow to the tank.

After he left, we started thinking of who we knew who might have the tools we needed. I actually ended up calling my boyfriend’s roommate, because I knew my boyfriend was already asleep and turns his phone off at night. So BF’s Roomie graciously came over, even though he had almost been asleep himself, and figured out a way to bust through the corrosion on the valve and cease the water flow. I rejoiced!

Except we could still hear dripping.

Turns out it was a pipe behind the water heater, which BF’s Roomie found with the help of my little ladybug mirror from B&BW (three cheers for sparkly impulse buys!). I called maintenance at precisely 8:00 this morning, and a very nice man is now draining our hot water tank and explaining to me how these older apartments have this super awesome design where a drain is placed behind the water heater where only house-elves could possibly reach it to keep it clear and clean. So that’s clogged, obviously, but he says we’ll have it fixed by the end of the day.

But once again, as with my car, I found myself succumbing to an instinct that told me I had to justify my decision-making in a home maintenance problem. Even as BF’s Roomie was working away at the shutoff valve, I was rambling about the evidence that suggested it was the water heater, or something in that area, and how shutting off the power and the water made sense. BF’s Roomie patiently listened and agreed with everything I said, but he gave me a few funny looks, so at one point I stopped myself.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but as a girl I’ve sort of been raised with this societal instinct that whatever I decide to do about home maintenance stuff is probably wrong.”

“Yay stereotyping,” he answered dryly.

I was able to recognize, identify, and control the ingrained tendency to second-guess myself this time, so I suppose my experience with my car breaking down has made some inroads into my mental definition of Me As Female Dealing With Problems of Male Expertise. And even though it turned out it wasn’t the water heater leaking, we would never have found the real problem without the logical decisions my roommate and I made.

Feminism at the Mechanic’s

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As I’ve already told you, my car broke down a few weeks ago. I chronicled the stress of the experience in the previous post. But now that I have some emotional and temporal distance from the incident I’ve thought about it more and managed to identify one contributing factor to my general anger at the situation.

I realized that part of my stress came from the fact that, subconsciously or otherwise, I had been conditioned my entire life to believe that if I, a lone female, entered a mechanic’s place of business, they would think me gullible, naive, and an easy target. Somewhere deep in the dusty file labeled “Car Stuff” in my brain, I had noted that if I ever needed to visit a mechanic, I should take a friend – no, a male friend – with me so that he could lend me some credibility. Mental images of scruffy men in oil-spattered coveralls elbowing each other and saying, “Heh heh” played over and over in my head. So I obeyed my socially conditioned impulse and took my male friend with me.

I have no idea where this lesson came from. It only just surfaced now, so I don’t remember if my dad or my mom or some well-meaning authority figure once told me that I should never go alone to a mechanic’s “as a girl” for fear of getting swindled. I asked my boyfriend about it, and he expressed surprise that I would ever feel that way. He had no idea what I was talking about. My female friends, on the other hand, yelped, “Exactly!” before I had even finished describing the situation. None of us could figure out where we’d learned it, but there it was – something in the air of the society we live in had taught us that we as females would not be respected as clients paying for a service in a traditionally male-centered industry. And we believed them.

When the mechanic initially only directed questions at my male friend, I resented it. I butted in to the conversation as if to say, “I’m here too.” Of course, once the process got under way and I became the real client in that I had to approve all the specific repairs and ordering of parts, everyone was perfectly nice. They explained each problem they found without condescension, gave me reasonable estimates, and bantered with me each time they called. Needless to say, they were not, in fact, rubbing their hands with glee at the chance to rip off some clueless female. They were skilled professionals performing a task for which I paid (or rather, my dad paid) a reasonable price.

And yet, even after this, I wonder if I’ll have the confidence, when I’m in a new city on my own, to waltz into a strange garage without a male friend at my side. It’s funny (in a sad kind of way) how deeply sexism runs.