These past weeks have been emotionally taxing. I am not quite sure how to explain why. I cannot put my finger on what’s bothering me, but something surely is. It’s established fact that we live in a world made for and by men. It’s no secret that patriarchy is alive and well. And this is a source of infinite trouble. Let me explain. I have a job. A full-time job that makes demands on my time and mindspace. At the end of the work day, when I wind up and head home, I park work aside and then start thinking of home. What do I make for dinner? Do I have vegetables to last me the week? Is there milk in the fridge? So many questions. So much planning that it leaves me with no energy to focus on things I want to do. The biggest casualty over the last few years has been my writing.
And then I see others, mostly men, tell me they go jogging, work out at the gym, train for a marathon or pick up a new hobby and I wonder where I am going wrong. Why am I unable to even read a book or write a blogpost with any amount of consistency when others are out there, conquering the world, setting up parallel careers, running extra miles to train for a half marathon and investing in the stock market? Do I lack the capability of being more than a corporate employee? And make no mistake. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a corporate employee. There is nothing wrong in having a 9-5 job that pays the bills and being consistently good at it. But this sense of inadequacy stems from somewhere.
This gets worse when people I speak to learn of my academic credentials, my language skills and my writing. “What the hell are you doing in a bank? This is not where you should be,” they tell me. Then where should I be? Why do others get to decide where I should be and what constitutes success for me? Why this expectation of me to go above and beyond?
When I sat down and thought about it, I realised something important. Most of these people who ask me these questions, who make value judgements on how much I am doing with my life, are men. And no matter what we say, many tasks are still gendered. Running a household is still very much a gendered task. Women carry the mental load of running a household, even if it is a single person household like mine. For some reason, women give a lot more emotional energy to maintaining the house and making it a home than men do. Maybe it is social conditioning.
When I think of my own parents, or my ex, I realise that my mother and I ran the house almost all the time. Making lists, sorting through groceries, chopping vegetables and prepping them for the week, organising the kitchen…it was all us. When Amma passed away, I took on that role almost unconsciously. On the other hand, when I left my marital home, it took a while for S to realise that I was doing all this and start doing it. He had to wake up one morning and realise he ran out of sugar to take on this task of planning and prepping. He has learnt over the years and today, I am sure the mental load on him is equal to the one on me in running our respective households. Sadly, that is not the case with most men I know. They never really get around to doing any of this because there is always a woman around to take up the job: mother, wife, girlfriend, partner or even sister. And unless this changes, women will continue to perform that emotional labour of keeping a household afloat.
The point of this rant is simply this: if you are a woman, be a little kinder to yourself when you drop the ball on something. It’s ok to be imperfect. It is ok to hold “just one job” and do nothing else. It is perfectly alright to sleep in on a Sunday morning and do absolutely nothing, even if that means the kitchen stays dirty for a while longer. This epiphany is the result of a day of rumination and self-loathing. But that’s a story for another day.