Two things, unrelated to each other (except in my mind, as
will become clear):
- The cake I made last night for a baby shower tomorrow
- An essay by Rufi Thorpe, Mother, Writer, Monster, Maid
The cake: a disaster.
First, never bake with egg whites from a box—even in an effort to save yourself
from wasting egg yolks—boxed egg whites don’t whip up the way egg
whites from an actual egg do. Second,
and this part is crucial: never use baking powder that expired five years ago.
In retrospect, both these of these things seem obvious.
Alas. I spent five hours baking two cakes, each of which failed to rise. The
first cake failed, or so I thought, because of the egg whites (which also
failed to whip up for my first batch of icing). My assumption about the egg
whites turned out wrong, though, because—to my utter despair—the second cake I
made also failed to rise. The true cause: my baking powder, which no longer retained any
of the properties of baking powder.
(Fun fact: you will know whether your baking powder is dead
if you put ¼ teaspoon in ½ cup water. If there is no fizz, go buy new baking
powder.)
So you may assume that tonight I am, yet again, making another
cake. Not so. After
tasting one of the four very thin cake layers I made to make sure it was edible, I
put three layers together to form a reasonably normal-looking cake. I covered its
imperfections with my second batch of (successful!) icing, and finally went to
bed.
And here’s where we get to the essay by Thorpe. There are a
great many things I sympathize with in her essay, and since I have no idea what
it’s like to be a mother, I can only guess what my own experience would be. I
do, however, have some experience as a wife, so those are the parts of the
essay I’ll comment on. As Thorpe describes, her husband does not cook and he
leaves his underwear on the floor of the bathroom. He also shrinks clothing in
the wash. This means that she cleans up the underwear, and she does the
cooking, and she does the laundry. She is unhappy about this, which is not surprising.
And yet, reading this all I could think was that it’s really ok for the food to be mediocre and
the underwear to remain on the floor. I know this because my food is often
mediocre and I too leave my underwear lying around. I still
do my fair share of the cooking, and no one picks up after me. (And when Josh leaves his clothes lying around, no one is picking up after him either.) None of this is ideal, but we muddle along regardless.
So I would like to make a recommendation to Thorpe and everyone like her: imperfection and mediocrity can be wonderful. Not
caring can be truly, truly liberating. Is our house the
cleanest? No. Do the dishes always get put away immediately? No. Have I shrunk clothes
in the wash? Yes, yes I have. Do I eat too much boxed mac and cheese? Yes, I
certainly do. Is this the way I would prefer my life to be? Not really. But are we still doing ok? Still enjoying ourselves? Yes, yes we are.
It’s fine. Not great, not perfect, but totally ok. Sort of
like the cake I made last night. I know that with fresh baking powder and
another carton of eggs, I could make a perfect, fluffy, beautiful cake. But I
don’t want to. I’m tired of baking. The cake I made is good enough.
12 comments:
That is a good essay. She is right - it IS really hard to take babies to New York. Most of the subway stations don't have elevators, so you have to walk down the stairs carrying the 20-lb baby with one hand, and the 25-lb stroller in the other.
Also, the underwear has to get picked up eventually by someone b/c guests are coming eventually and you don't want them to see your huge bathroom underwear-pile.
Yes, I know about the NYC escalator deficit. I remember as a little kid it was really difficult to climb up and down all those stairs. Probably harder on my Mom, though.
The underwear does get picked up eventually, if only to spare guests. But her husband can pick up his underwear! All she needs to do is leave it on the floor and ask him to do it. She also doesn't have to resent him for not being a good cook. She just needs to ask him to make dinner and then eat the mediocre result without complaining. Would he starve if she didn't exist? No. She needs to unclench.
Not letting perfection be the enemy of the good is one of my mantras. I am really glad I'm not a perfectionist. It seems like a hard way to go through life.
However, this woman's main problems seem to be that she doesn't want to be a stay at home mom, her husband works too much, and she still nurses. Those seem to me to be fixable issues.
Agreed! Except that I don't think that not nursing and her husband working less will help at all. Her main reason for doing all the housework is that she's better at it. (She's better at cooking, better at washing the clothes, better at keeping preschool schedules straight, better at remembering to pick up underwear, etc). It seems to me that if she was ok with mediocre food and occasionally shrunken clothes, he would do a lot more work. I agree that is is fixable, but less his problem and more hers.
*Edit: I didn't mean to suggest that giving up nursing wouldn't help. I agree, it would definitely help. You know my thoughts on nursing!
I agree this is mainly her problem. What I was thinking is that she maybe feels guilty, since he works a lot more than she does, and feels compelled to do more housework, and that is her justification for it. A lot of her laments seemed like justifications to me...like every little thing is the most important thing in the whole world so obviously she has to attend to it. Many, many women leave their 10 month (!) olds overnight for work obligations. I am not a parent, so I don't know, but I submit that it is not important to get to the bottom of the leprechaun/bird poop situation, and that a babysitter would be just fine. And then she could write without agonizing over the minutia of her house and child, and then she would become less obsessive about them- which would also give her husband more freedom to do things the way he thinks they should be done. This sounds like what she wants to do, but she can't admit it to herself. Also, based on my research, private pre-school for one kid costs about the same as a nanny/au pair for both kids. Also, also, I think she should see a therapist, it sounds like she is depressed.
I don't mean to say there is anything wrong with being a stay at home parent and thinking about leprechauns or not wanting to leave a baby overnight. It just doesn't seem like what she wants. She could make choices that allow her to do more of what she wants.
Yes, I agree absolutely and completely. I've read multiple essays like this one where the mom says she would love to be able to go to the bathroom by herself and find time to take a shower. Again, I'm not a mother, but I think I would hire a random person off the street to look after my child, and pay them the last dime I had, before I sacrificed the ability to shower or use the toilet.
And if I ever have children, I will probably come back and read this post and feel like my past-self was really naive. But this is what blogging is for, right?
Well, I don't like showering anyway, so maybe it will be fine! :)
If you're nursing, it is a problem to leave a child for more than a night. You could say, well, stop nursing, but is it reasonable to demand that women stop nursing and give up a year's worth of free baby nutrition just so they can take one overnight work trip?
It's not hard to take a quick shower if you secure the baby in one of many baby jails that you will acquire when you acquire a baby. But the basic principle behind this complaint is true - unless the baby is in a crib or harnessed into a stationary device, you can't take your eyes off him for more than two minutes or he will self-destruct. It's really a shocking adjustment from pre-baby life. Also, when you interview potential babysitters, your faith in random people off the street, which is what many babysitters effectively are, may decline.
I don't think it's perfectionist or wrong to desire to live in reasonable cleanliness and to care for your own children and to write books or do whatever job you have. These are good desires from which your family and society as a whole benefits. That fulfilling all these desires is hard is not necessarily a problem that other people or the state or whatever need to help you solve, but what's wrong with acknowledging it, or writing an essay about it? Motherhood and home-making are central and valuable human activities, even for people who have careers. It's easy to dismiss them in theory as low priorities, but I don't know how persuasive you will find the justification that, "I'm not a perfectionist" when it means that your own and all your friends' houses are filthy and their children are uncivilized.
I have no firsthand knowledge of any of this, but I don't disagree with anything you said. Babies seem really hard. The solution though, cannot be to become a martyr to your child, husband, and house, to the point where, if you could do it all over, you wouldn't choose to have any of them. There seem to be some reasonably achievable compromises that she is not willing to consider.
There is nothing wrong with her writing this essay, or acknowledging her unhappiness. I love confessional essays of all kinds! I just don't feel as sorry for her as she wants me to. As Alex said, there are reasonably achievable compromises that would lessen her misery.
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