He Said, She Said

He said, "I'm going to write now," and he disappeared into his den. She said, "I'm going to write after I do the laundry and cook dinner and scrub out the bathtub," and the upper half of her disappeared into the dryer.

Yes, gender does matter.

I juggle working on my novel freelance writing with my full-time teaching job and all the stuff that needs to get done around the house. I do the lawn mowing, but other than that, not much yard work gets done. (The weeds are hardy. If they can't survive on their own, they deserve to die, and somewhere I read that when you accumulate a decade's-worth of sweet gum balls on the ground, they really enrich the soil... so I'm leaving them where they fall.) My husband does most of the cooking, but he also does most of the careless messing.

Leaving a spoon dripping of something on the counter... right next to the sink. Tracking in mud all over the house. (He and the dog tag team on this one.) Tapping his razor on the side of the sink, leaving a trail of whiskers--every single morning. (Turning on the faucet, a few inches away, is too much to expect, apparently.) And I won't even mention the unspeakable things that happen on the bathroom floor in the vicinity of the toilet.

If my husband had a passion--like creating watercolors or making things out of wood--I am quite sure he wouldn't feel it necessary to mop the floor, room by room, while he also painted or circular sawed. Instead, I'm almost sure that when the whim hit him, he'd just go into the basement or his "studio" (which would be the carport or our one solitary bathroom, since that's the only space we'd have available) to work on his craft... and thoughts about housework would not even enter his mind, let alone fly out the dusty window.

As a woman, I do have to juggle things. And as a woman writer, I'm not taken as seriously than if I were a man. If you think that mentality is a thing of the past--the idea that women should retreat into the drawing room and dabble in writing as a unimportant hobby--think again. Today, #ThingsOnlyWomenWritersHear is going strong. #WhatWoCWritersHear is even worse. I think that automatically, just because of what they have dangling a bit under their belt, male writers' work is considered with seriousness... while women's writing is considered a leisure activity--something that's done in their spare time.

I haven't seen the movie Marriage Story yet, but I have seen parts of the Laura Dern monologue, where she's ranting about the role and burden of women. And she's right.

Here is a wonderful article that includes tweets by Joanne Harris (author of Chocolat), Jodi Picoult and Cheryl Strayed. Check out some of the archaic comments.

I will never forget something I heard, even though it was said decades ago. A bunch of us had gone out to dinner together--some of us were childless but some of us had chewed off our legs to get away from the kids for the evening. One of us said to someone, "So, your husband's babysitting tonight?"

Babysitting? Is that what the everyday care of children is called when women do it? I think not.

Even I have been known to look admiringly at a dad who's playing in the park with his kids--with no partner in sight. What a wonderful father! Do I do that when I see a mom having fun with her children?

No. That's just the way it is. I have to shake the cobwebs off my own thinking occasionally, because in my mind, when people come into our house and see the dog hair dustbunnies and the toothpaste-spattered bathroom mirror, in my opinion, they don't say the two of us are slobs. Instead, according to my screwed-up thinking, they're giving me--and only me--a D+ on housekeeping skills.

When will my writing be considered as important as a man's? And when will my housekeeping (or lack of) be considered not-so-important?

Sioux Roslawski, despite how much she dislikes doing housework, loves this mop (she gets a leg workout each time she wrings it out), and she loves revising. Taking a rough first draft and refining it until it's a semi-fine piece of writing is satisfying, in her opinion. To read more of Sioux's stuff, go to Sioux's Page, her blog.

11 comments #ThingsOnlyWomenWritersHear, #WhatWoCWritersHear, Cheryl Strayed, Joanne Harris, Jodi Picoult, Sioux Roslawski