My Not-so-Perfect Life

Update: Monday, Feb. 8:  Weird coincidence!  Faulkner Fox is this month's author for Blogging for Books over at The Zero Boss.  So Be sure to enter, and give her some quality blogging to read! Deadline is Next Monday!

When Faulkner Fox was my age, she had an ongoing fantasy of a man, a child, and a house by the sea.  She got three of the four (no ocean), and wondered why she was unhappy.  Thank god, she didn't keep these feelings to herself.  Instead she wrote Dispatches From My Not-So-Perfect-Life, which the universe sent to me as I've worked through a difficult week, a difficult place emotionally.  My anger cache is still in the process of emptying, and letting it out, acknowledging where I am right now seems to be the best thing for me right now.  The most important thing in the last week has been realizing that I am not alone.  Thank you Sarah, Day, Natalie, Tanya, and Michele for reminding me that I'm not alone --that other struggle with these feelings too--and for validating where I am right now.

Which is why it is simply serendipitous that the universe dumped Dispatches into my lap, with Fox's unflinching take on bitterness, anger, and reaching your dream.  I wanted to shout with glee as I read her book in big hungry gulps Wednesday.  Yes, yes, yes! She with her "dark thing" mentality, with her endless questioning, with her insistence on engaging her partners in tough discussions about domestic equity,  her deep need to engage in real no-holds-barred conversations about feelings with others,  she speaks to a part of me that has been desperately needing validation.  Fox helps me to see that I am not alone in my confusion, in my unhappiness, in the endless perfectionism and competitiveness that keeps me isolated from others.

I have long respected  Fox's articles on www.salon.com, and her award-winning poetry.  To have someone whom I view as an untouchable role-model, a writing idol, admit that she too feels bitter about the division of housework and chores, confused about being home during "working hours," and unhappy forcing herself info a mold, makes this weight of guilt slide a little further off my shoulders.

I have been very focused on my insular little world where I work part-time to deal with my health issues, and try to maintain domestic harmony.  In the process, I became disconnected from the greater feminist issues playing out here.  I am a part-time worker for a different reason than Fox, who raises her two young sons, but we face the same guilt of being torn between ambitions and the pressures of being the "one at home," the lower wage earner in a partnership of supposed equals. 

I am not alone at failing to live up to some unrealistic assumption that women who work part-time should have a full-time perfect home.  I have felt demoralized by my part-time status, and deeply unhappy about how unsuitable I am for the domestic life.  It would be one thing if I enjoyed cleaning or more to the point, if I had any talent at all for it.  I lack the organized-gene, the ability to maintain a routine seems beyond me at the best of times, and laughable during a flare. 

I enjoy clean, I relish well-organized closets and cupboards, but I've basically sucked at being a housewife.  I am a fabulous cook, but  I have a unique talent for using every dish in the house, every available inch of counter space, and spewing ingredients everywhere, littering my floor with vegetable shrapnel.  I cut wide swathes through the mess.  I am not a detail-oriented person in much of my life, and I have no idea how to keep anything with corners and crevices looking new. 

But, because I work part-time I have self-assigned myself responsibility for everything in this house.  I own laundry mountain.  I do, however, refuse to own the dish situation or the litter box disaster area.  I do have some limits.  (Actually, no.  Now that I think about it. I feel guilty about these areas too.  I'm just honest that I'm not going to be the one to fix them).  I've filled gigabytes of valuable Internet space with my talent for being a martyr.  As if being "good" at being home could some how make up for the inadequacy I feel.

Like me, Fox is blessed with a fabulous partner, and they have had to carefully negotiate and renegotiate their responsibilities for house and home and carve out space for their own identities.  I forget that other couples have long debates over chore charts and systems of relative fairness.  Sometimes, when all you  see is a snapshot or a glimpse of someone else's life, it's easy to convince yourself that they have the "perfect life."  I see a scene of domestic bliss, and I sigh in longing. 

It never occurs to my guilt-ridden, competitive mind that perhaps their closets are overflowing, perhaps they too are masters of "crisis cleaning." I am unable to see all the staging, all the underlying pressures that we all share because I am too busy judging myself as inadequate.  My wonderful, amazing partner, has been offering to get us a bi-weekly housekeeper for over a year now.  And I've turned him repeatedly because it felt like admitting another failure in my life.

Yes, I know.  I'm crazy.  My future husband offers me a housekeeper and I say "no, I'd rather keep earning my martyr stripes, thanks."  Fox does an amazing job of illuminating the cultural cues that feed this perfectionism and neurotic competitiveness that facilitate silence and the construction of facades.  This mutual agreement among women to pretend that we can indeed handle it all is deeply seated in our culture.  We are reluctant to investigate the facade--to see what's behind the picture.  We are in essence limited by our own judgments.

I have judged my contributions to our partnership as inadequate.  I have judged myself as not measuring up to the ridiculously high standards I set for myself.  Like Fox, I have found it difficult to talk to about these feelings, difficult to engage other women in deep friendship.  This inability to connect increases the feelings of isolation, as my assumptions of others perfection divorces me from the possibility that they might feel the same way I do.

Through my friends in the computer, other blog writers who tell it like it is,  and a few tentative conversations with other women who appear to "have it all", I've learned that many people have someone or a service to help them maintain that illusion of perfection.  I've decided that it's not a failure to say that I can't do it all, that I shouldn't have to do it all, that being able to carve out space for myself in the presence of Ms. MS means that I have to pick and choose what I expend my energy on.  I'm gradually learning that it is truly OK to be me, to not like mopping, to cry when I hurt, to admit my anger, to show my quirkiness to the world. 

Thanks to Faulkner Fox, I feel more empowered in my quest to dismantle the facade and be here, be real now.  My not-so-perfect life is perfectly okay.