The stay-at-home feminist

Guest column: Sarajoy Van Boven

Today I am not going to work, nor tomorrow, or the next day.  I don’t know how long this will go on but for now I am a stay-at-home feminist – which is a crazy thing to be, or so the world tells me.

It’s not like I’m not working here – I have two kids, I own a farm, I participate in board meetings. I am a storyteller and blogger.  No matter how much self-directed productivity I churn out – it never seems to be clear to others, or myself, exactly what it is I do.

I create a wake of confusion everywhere I go.  If you believe god made woman with a recipe involving one manly rib and a dictate to remain at home with diapers and spatulas, then you might think we agree on everything – until you’re shocked we don’t.

If a career woman delved with me into the intellectual regions of our brains, she might end the conversation sputtering about my irresponsible lifestyle. Experience leads me to believe that people on both sides imagine I’m a betrayal of all they believe in.  I probably am but not on purpose.  The person I’m most worried about betraying is myself, everyone else just happens to be collateral damage.

My bank account and I hope it will be different someday.  Maybe someday, I will think about getting a job and instead of reaching for the barf bucket, I’ll jump up shouting “Hurray, Take ME!”  Someday I might leap into that great job market with my polished list of skills, carefully inflated accomplishments and an archeological description of my prehistoric work experience.  Someday, I will look back over the hours and account for every well-paid moment  And when people ask me what it is I do, I’ll have a succinct title to hand them.

Someday, if I get a job, I will have to buy milk from the store because I won’t have time to slog out to the barn in a holy, red sunrise to milk it from my mostly-wild, most-un-docile cow, Hendrika.  Someday I might have to let professionals grow my food, instead of filling the sunroom with tomato seedlings in February and wrestling all summer with the reigning champion of the garden: Weeds.  Someday, I might decide that I do want a list of autocrats ruling my day: A boss, a calendar, a client and the schedules of daycares and babysitters.

I’ve worked for a paycheck since I was 15, a state of affairs that continued through my first seven years of parenting.  I was paid $2 per hour all summer – after childcare costs – while someone else took my kids swimming, fishing and bicycle riding.  I got yelled at for missing work on snow days, as if I were in charge of the weather and the decision to close school.  Like most women, I careened from home to work to two daycare centers to the store, and finished my day folding laundry around midnight.  When my doctor asked what I did for myself and when I relaxed, I gawked at her.

So it is with feminist pride, I reserve those few hours I now have between carpools and buses – for myself.  This is what our mothers and grandmothers fought for (not mine, mine were decidedly in the kitchen, on the farm, wearing bras, not burning them). They did not fight for the obligation to give every last moment to the demands of boss, children and PTA.

We women are indeed dealt a ‘wonky’ set of cards and it takes awhile to figure out how to play them, if we even get to.

At a party – actually at several parties – peers have said I’m docking my lifetime earnings and setting my career back. They have said I’m exposing myself to serious risk should divorce strike my family (’cause that’s why we go to parties, right, to be lectured about how to live our lives by the certain-type-of-feminist who doesn’t seem to get the irony.) To this, I’ve responded with the well-thought out statement of “Duh.”  It’s not all about money and fear.

I’ve been given marching orders, “Get out and work because ‘we’ need everyone pushing on that glass ceiling if it’s ever going to shatter.”  I’ve read the argument that I’m wasting my college education – because children don’t benefit from college-educated mothers, apparently – and still, I irresponsibly insist, it’s my life to do with as I please, despite the message: ‘Real feminists have bosses.’

So what do I do, in this the ultimate dead-end, no-raise, promotion-less job. Here, I am a ‘Celebrant of Domestic Life.’  I am myself, all day long: A braless, barn-booted, poetry-spewing, hot-salsa-canning, mother-of-all-trades.

Someday, I may go back to earn money, pad some CEO’s golden parachute, and pay income taxes.  I may be sent back by circumstances, as family life on one income is admittedly precarious; as sometimes one wants a working dishwasher or needs new wheels; as marriages do fail, no matter how strong they might seem at one time or another.  Maybe I’ll throw myself back into the daily grinder by an internal drive for recognition, camaraderie, and ambition.  Maybe I’ll run into a fabulous, do-not-miss job opportunity.  I’m open.  This situation is not permanent – my children are growing and change is inevitable.

What is permanent is the commitment to my own bush-whacking un-path. And this is where it’s brought me today: A bucolic meadow, a barn with chickens and cows and a root cellar full of pumpkins.

I am more certain than ever that our hard-won rights as women include the right not to work for money but for ourselves, should the opportunity arise.  There’s only one obligation here – to follow our hearts.  You follow yours.  I’ll follow mine.