Joanna Schroeder shares how, when times got tough, she was able to take on a new role that challenged her identity in order to help her family.
For little girls these days, it’s all about the princesses.
Sure, there have are exceptions, the ones who like American Girl or even dinosaurs, but this princess mania is out of control. It was different when most of us were small; we didn’t have DVD players to loop Cinderella and indoctrinate us into the myth of the conquering hero who will save you from all your problems. We didn’t have that terrible Disney store wailing the siren song of Belle nighties in size 4T, made of polyester, and doused with flame retardant.
I, for one, never wanted to be a princess. I didn’t daydream about a fairytale wedding. Credit goes to lack of technology, but also to my mother. She didn’t read us princess stories; she read Shel Silverstein, Richard Scarry, Frog and Toad, and the like. She was a feminist—actually a “Women’s Lib’er”—a League of Women Voters board member, and a single working mother finishing the college degree she’d abandoned to marry my father.
She didn’t tell me not to idealize marriage, but she didn’t have to. My parents’ terrible marriage, though I hardly remember it, was enough to show me that there were no such things as fairy tales.
Like other tough-chicks in the early nineties, I wore Doc Martens to my Junior Prom and went to Senior Prom with my best gays. I quit shaving my legs (and everything else) just in time to fit in with the other girls at Hampshire College. Yes indeedy, ladies and gentlemen, I was a woman now, and if you listened very closely, you might hear me roar. I couldn’t have told you who Foucault, Friedan, Wollstonecraft, or even Naomi Wolf was, but I had me some hairy armpits.
At Hampshire, the late (great) Professor Eric Schocket assigned us a book that would haunt me for the next decade and a half: Not June Cleaver. Since then I’ve forgotten almost everything inside of it, but the title and the book itself stuck with me and directed who I was—or more accurately who I wasn’t—through two marriages and into motherhood.
I was never going to be June Cleaver. The whole idea repulsed me: women, perfectly coiffed and subservient, cleaning house and making dinner for their misogynistic patriarchal husbands? No thanks. I didn’t know how my life was going to unfold, but I knew it wasn’t going to look like that. Both my first and my second husbands are strong, sensitive men who never tried to control me or make me into their June Cleaver. The second marriage, so far, has stuck.
♦◊♦
When I got pregnant with my eldest son, I vowed to go back to work as soon as I could. I never imagined myself in a mommy group or building block towers. I wanted an excellent nanny while my television producer husband and I were at work; I wanted the house clean and the baby fed when I got home.
But life never unfolds the way we want it to. I worked at a company that was run entirely by women until, at the end of my pregnancy, the arrogant, woman-hating, power-mongering brother of the owner went on a campaign of lies to have all of us in management discredited. I quit before I could be fired like everyone else and then stayed home with my son for five months.
When I went back to work, I had a peach of a job where I worked three to five days a week for an amazing salary. But then the recession hit and our store, like almost every other independent retail store in Los Angeles, closed. We were heartbroken. No retail job would hire me back at that wage, as there was a flood of over-qualified buyers and managers in the hiring pool. Anything less that what I was paid before would have been too little to justify the nanny. I decided to try staying home.
My husband’s company closed at the same time, and he had to find freelance work. We struggled financially, and soon I had a second baby. The nanny was gone, my husband was miserable, we were financially insecure, I had no sex drive, no career drive, and no life drive. We were empty shells of the sexy power couple we had been a few years earlier.
Finally he took a job out of desperation that required more than 60 hours of work per week. The house was filthy and my husband (who has never once pressured me to do anything aside from be nice to him and find what makes me happy), still never asked me to clean the house or cook dinner. He knew I didn’t like cooking or cleaning, and he didn’t expect it. Sometimes he got home from work at 10 p.m. and threw his own laundry into the machine. Cleaning the toilet pissed me off, and I grew resentful. It’s not that I felt I was better than cleaning or cooking; it was that I was not June Cleaver. I wasn’t a housewife … was I?
♦◊♦
Eventually someone said something to me that is so obvious but somehow also so hard to make real: if you want something different, you have to do something different. I had to do it. I had to clean my own toilet, I had to cook dinner for my family, and I had to make my home peaceful for my poor husband who was sacrificing so much for our family so we could stay in our home in a safe neighborhood with great public schools.
Why was I resisting? Why was I so afraid to take care of my husband and my home? I had to face the truth that taking care of your family doesn’t make you June Cleaver. I didn’t have to chant, “Yes, dear,” to Ivan, like June did to Ward. Slowly, I stopped resenting the mop, the vacuum, and the stove as symbols of oppression. How moronic! They’re just tools. If I were cutting down a tree, would I resent the chainsaw? No.
As the anger toward my new role slipped away, my happiness and sense of self returned. I started writing again, and I rediscovered my sex-drive. I wrote my first novel (still in the works), started copywriting, started a sex and dating advice blog with my old Hampshire pal, Eli, and did all of it after I put my kids in bed, read them Frog and Toad, and turned out the light. If I am June Cleaver, I am June Cleaver in ripped jeans, unkempt hair, and Converse hi-tops. I am June Cleaver with a sex blog and a too-loud laugh.
Am I going to do this at-home-mommy business forever? Probably not. I admire and still sort of envy my dear friend Summer, who has an amazing high-pressure corporate job in fashion, a sweet, rock-musician hubby, and two kids the same ages as mine. But now I see how complicated her life is, too. We’re both feminists, we’re both crazy-tough, we’re both good moms, and we’re both a part of the fabric of womanhood.
As for my husband, he is still torn about all the June Cleaver-ing happening at our house. He is pleasantly surprised by, and sometimes feels guilty for, the clean underwear and socks that magically appear in his drawers, by fresh shirts hanging in the closet daily, by dinners that are often waiting for him no matter what hour he returns home.
He feels guilty because he knows this wasn’t my dream for myself, and he feels guilty because of how damn much he enjoys it. He tells me all the time, “You didn’t have to!” and I smile, because I know I didn’t have to.
And that’s why I did it.
—Photo thisgeekredes/Flickr
It’s funny to re-read this. Little did I know that barely a month after I wrote this I would start working for GMP and would no longer be a full-time stay-at-home mom!
But I DID just hire a lady to help clean and PHEW if that isn’t the greatest thing in the world!
Excellent article, well done 🙂
Hmm…get a name BEFORE making an ass comment… I better write that down. Will I have to remember her name, or will asking for it be enough? Does that apply to boobs as well, or just asses? Why didn’t those pick-up sites mention great stuff like this? I always thought my AXE body spray was all I needed…. : – ) So, this friend with the great ass. What’s her situation…. I did sort of intend the name to be ambiguous in that way. Maybe also meant to be a warning about the content of any message to follow. On… Read more »
So true, That Guy!
My friend Summer, the one in the article above, she has an amazing nanny for her kids, and she calls her “my wife”…
Hey That Guy, (seems funny to call you “That Guy” – when my friends and I say someone’s “That Guy” usually we’re referring to a guy being a creep or a douchebag. As in, “He told you you have a great ass before he asked your name? I guess he’s ‘That Guy.'” You’re obviously not That Guy. Anyway. Yes, there’s a reason I chose to reference Cinderella over Sleeping Beauty or LIttle Mermaid. I love that you caught the irony, thank you. You know the old adage, if we paid the people we value the most salaries appropriate to their… Read more »
This is terrific. Makes me laugh and sigh and cheer all at the same time.
Thanks Kathy, for your support! 😉
“I wanted an excellent nanny while my television producer husband and I were at work; I wanted the house clean and the baby fed when I got home.” I got stuck on what I perceived as a delicious irony here, and I wonder if anyone else noticed it. Correct whatever I get wrong here: I’m assuming that the “excellent nanny” you hired was a woman, and that you paid her much less than what you made working outside the home. You expected to come home to a clean house, made clean by a woman working in a traditional household role.… Read more »
I like stories with happy endings. She learned most non-feminists already know well before into marriage.
It’s interesting too in that it shows what Women’s Studies classes do to young minds: teaches young women that, even if their husband is working 60 hours a week while they are at home, he should still do the laundry and cleaning because it’s misogynistic patriarchal oppression for a woman to do such things.
I think she’s saying that women’s studies and just awareness of equal rights puts a stigma on certain household tasks that both she and her husband felt. I think a lot of people must have similar issues despite their gender or if they are “feminist”.
You got it wrong. Womens Studies doesn’t teach young women is that housework is mysoginistic & patriachal. But it does teach young women to challenge the idea that having a penis makes a person more special & that it gives him the right to order you around.
As a result of Women’s Studies and feminist teachings, that’s what the writer end up associating it with. Women’s Studies ends up creating hositility toward males.
I must respond here by honoring the memory of Eli’s and my fantastic professor, Eric Schocket, who was both a masculinist and a feminist, and taught us to study gender and politics with curiosity and not hostility. He should have had another fifty years to continue teaching but lymphoma stopped him short. But that is a story for another time, I guess….
Curiosity, not hostility. I love this. I think that should be the focus of any academic study. Gender studies, should study gender-the why of it. I’ve studied women’s studies and I have no hostility towards males, but I do have impatience towards binary “normative” roles. Men do this! Women do this! Men can clean a toilet just as well as a woman can. If a man is out of work, there should be no shame in taking on the role of home protector/facilitator. If a woman is out of work, no shame in her doing it. That should be the… Read more »
This comment is not directed to either of you personally. However, I have noticed with [many] Women’s and Gender Studies current or former students is that they don’t see any pattern among their members of having or acting out hostily toward males. Yet, many men and women claim that they see it acted out very clearly, and have for quite some time.
Eric, Thanks for not aiming it at us personally, but I want you to think a bit deeper about your perception of what a student of (or fan of) Women’s Studies looks like. First, there is the issue of correlation versus causation. Does WS as a program (or even hobby) CAUSE women to become man-hating militant feminists? You argue that yes, this is happening to some degree. But perhaps what you’re seeing is actually a correlation. For instance, a woman who may already have issues with men is more likely to go into the WS field, to study it with… Read more »
Is feminism angry and bitter? Or fundamentally about equality and choice? Does women studies make people hate men? Or do man-haters often choose courses that agree with them?
I’d say both are true, feminism is as broad an arena as masculism and one is bound to find hate and love in equal measures. I don’t think either one defines it, but I’d like to think that egalitarianism will win out. I don’t think there’ll ever be women’s rights without men’s rights and vica versa.
Wow. I’ve been trying to write something very similar (except from the man’s perspective) and you nailed it. Good stuff.
Would love to read yours, Daddy Files. Happy to give some notes if you’d like. You can email me through the blog’s email link.
I’d like to see that, too. The basic message here, that someone kinda does need to clean the toilet and cook the dinner, and that if it’s you, it doesn’t mean you’re a throwback, weak, or a tool. It is really lousy that some of the most important work that gets done every day isn’t paid at all, and so we very often don’t value it, even when we do it ourselves. (I am the current chief toilet scrubber, cook, and dog walker, and a socialist feminist. It gets me through the day.) I just checked out your blog, Daddy… Read more »
Great story! I love that you do your work after the kids go to bed. Sounds familiar…
Yours is an interesting story. I am curious why it’s on this site, but I still enjoyed reading it.