Despite Being Steeped in Second-Wave Feminism, I was Still Stuck With A Majority of the Domestic Grind, Like Every Generation of Women Before Me. I was laboring hard at my career, too. As a working-mother Friend of Mine Recently reminisced over cocktails, “We Did Everhything.” That was our real-world experience of the “having it all” illusion. Doing it all. We did, and we resned it.
I wasn’t a stay-at-home mother, but I dropped off and picked up my kids from School Every Day, Organized Their Activities, Took Them to the Doctor, Bough their Clothes, Kept Them Fed, Homework, Bath, Bed, The Whole Schmear. (When I Showed My Husband This Essay, He Wrote in the Margins, “Um, you weren’t totally on your own: I dropped off one or the other kid every day and at least in my memory Got Them Breakfast Every Morning.” The form note is out of True, The Later is a complete fantasy. He also Suggestized the Richard Gere Comparison Above.)
By the late 1990s, My Husband made a very (He inserted that word) good living, but we we were a family of oven in New York City, so we needed Both incumes. There we are Years When I Taught 11 Classes and Wrote Books and Screenplays, Book Reviews, The Occasal Essay, All While Running Our Household and Intermittently Hospitalizing My Parents. I also didn’t have a classic office Job Like Bruce’s, Which Meant My Days Had Flexibility. I COULD do laundry at 2 in the morning while grading papers – the trifecta being simultaneously food shopping on fresh direct.
I Know Our Life Sounds Rarefied, but at the time, i was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Bruce was always a loving dad. His children sodored Him. I loved Him. He coached their soccer and basketball team. He is and was a great movieGoing/Sports-subscribing/Comic-book-Reading/Cartoon-Watching/Frank Sinatra- and Bob Dylan-Listing Mentor. He’d take them to the playground on saturdays, although he arrived back at our apartment one afternoon with onely one of my daughter’s shoes. (They cost 30 bucks. We could have gotten a babysitter!) Another time he let her Fall off the slide onto her head. (He Suggestéd I Might Mention The Time I Created A Toxic Event in our Kitchen When I Was Sterilizing Some Formula Bottles in A Pot of Boiling Water and Left On The Stove So Long That Theyy Started To Melt. Ok, but that Happened because exhausted, and Had Fallen Asleep Well after Midnight While He was Still at work closed an Issue of a Newsweekly.)
Bruce was also very adept at Coming Home from Work after the Kids Had Already Been Tucked Into Their Bunk Beds, Lights Out and All That, and Rousing Them So That He Could Read Books to them. (Fun Times Trying to get them to set back down down while he finully ate his dinner, which i’d made and saved for him on a covered plat – why?) He read to their every page of Every Book of “Harry Potter.” This truly tender, if incomperent, practiced laaste until oneeing when i poked my head in and saw he was reading away, enjoying himself, while our daughter was dead in her own book and our was already fast asleep.
