MARGINALIA

ON BEING
A GEN-X FEMINIST WHO FINDS
HERSELF PREGNANT AND
WITHOUT A REAL JOB

Valerie Weaver-Zercher

A box on our income tax return is what finally did it. Name, date, then the clincher: “occupation.” In my nine-month pregnant state, recently a graduate student, and now in some no-man’s (read: only women’s) land of “Interrupted Career but Not-Yet Motherhood,” I found myself cringing at a blank I used to fill in with pride. No longer “editor,” no longer “mediator,” no longer even “student,” I was forced to write that dreaded word that would define me to my government for at least this tax year: homemaker.

In my worst moments, I think I should have simply written “none.” Indeed, at these times even absence and void sound better than my chosen identity on that form. The term makes me feel reduced and shrunken anyway, so I might as well have abandoned any semblance of productive economic identity.

As I write this, I’m amazed at how offensive honest emotion can sound. Indeed, if I haven’t offended anyone yet, I should have. After all, I’m one of those Gen-X feminists who have supposedly learned the lessons of our harried and overworked mothers: that to be a feminist you don’t have to be both Super Career Woman and the Mom Who Bakes All The Family’s Bread and Reads to Her Children for Four Hours a Day.

I’m a Mennonite who values simple living and family enough to carry a torch for men and women who choose to stay home with children rather than work 50 hours a week so that they can take their kids to Disney World or buy an SUV.

And I’m the daughter of a woman who has written “homemaker” on stacks of tax forms but whose leadership and activism in advancing women’s rights in the church and society make the designation seem limp and confining.

So why my almost physical recoiling from taking the pen and writing “homemaker” on a form I’ll never have to see again anyway? Why this gut-level revulsion at a term that, intellectually at least, I believe encompasses what Christians should be about: “making home” for others? How have I come to scorn precisely the identities—“mother” and “homemaker”—that I, a well-reasoning adult, have for now chosen for myself?

Perhaps I’ve been duped: both by a few unreflective feminists who unwittingly denigrate women who work at home, and by a capitalist system that requires that we brand ourselves as economically useful. Perhaps. But I think the answer lies somewhere beyond the excesses of feminism and capitalism or their claims on my identity, or at least in some complex mixture of the two.

This will have to be a case of writing myself into the answers, of jumping into the abyss of an essay and not knowing where I will land. I find comfort in the fact that “essay” actually means “a way in,” a path designed for exploration and query rather than a superhighway toward solution and coherence. By the time I finish this piece, I could be nursing my first child, a fact which could by itself re-map this essay-ing path.

I’m sitting in my living room with five other women: three who have children, two who do not, and me, somewhere in-between. I feel like a pregnant fulcrum, holding the balance in our group for only a few more days before tipping toward those with children.

We’re at the first meeting of our book group, which we’ve formed to discuss books about faith and spirituality. Even though we don’t all know each other, there is that easy, turn-taking rhythm to our conversation that often emerges in groups of women.

Despite the relative ease of our conversation, however, I find myself growing tense whenever a mother mentions her children and the others chime in with child-related stories. I’m frustrated that a group of women can’t have a conversation about books and God and all those traditionally male pursuits without someone reminding me that we all have vaginas and breasts, some of which have given birth to and nursed babies.

I’m angry at my own pregnant body for turning conversations even more toward motherhood. And I’m also painfully aware that one of the women who is not a mother recently had a miscarriage.

Then I find myself getting tense at the very fact that I’m getting tense. Children are a huge part of these mothers’ reality—a reality I will be entering any day now, I remind myself—and why should they not bring the stuff of everyday life into discussions of faith? Indeed, isn’t that what I believe “doing theology” is all about? Don’t I view it as making connections between the daily and the divine?

And how can I assume a miscarriage automatically makes a woman cry or take offense at hearing stories of other women’s children? Doesn’t that idea further position women’s identities as wrapped up in their reproductive “abilities”?

Once again, as with the tax form, my frustration makes little logical sense. I want to stop resisting this “mother” identity, to stop lashing out in my mind against those who embrace it. I move in a liberated world, where equality of the genders is assumed in my marriage, my church, my friendship circles.

Why, then, this anger? I work to untangle the knot of the anger, to view more clearly the threads that form it. I then see that the thick threads of such forces as patriarchy, capitalism, and unredeemed feminism snarl together with the thinner ones of my own experiences.

These include the certainty of some people that I’ll be the one to stay home; surely my husband wouldn’t interrupt his career! The expectation that I’ll get a job immediately, that I couldn’t survive the intellectual impoverishment of homemaking. The assumptions of some that bearing children must fulfill a lifelong goal (my being a girl and all). The questions of those who wonder if I know how thoroughly child-rearing will tie me down.

While I will never completely untangle the threads of this anger, I find some semblance of clarity and hope in “The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and 'Women’s Work,'” a lecture that writer Kathleen Norris gave at Saint Mary’s College in 1998.

Norris acknowledges the risk of talking about things like laundry and dishes at a women’s college, since “educating women is meant to free us from being relegated to such thoroughly domestic roles, and it does,” she writes. “But the daily we have always with us, a nagging reminder that the dishes must be done, the floor mopped or vacuumed, the dirty laundry washed.”

Rather than scorn such ordinary, “homemaking” activities, Norris invites us to see them as pathways to God, times for contemplation and prayer. “A mature feminism recognizes that subjects such as cooking can be difficult for women to address, as they have so often been seen as insignificant ‘women’s work,’” Norris writes, “but it also asks us to recognize that their intimate nature makes them serious and important.”

I know what Norris is talking about. I too have known the peace and focus that comes with kneading bread, the space my mind can make for God when I’m chopping potatoes for soup or ironing a shirt.

Yet I’m afraid to admit it. I fear acknowledging that I too can find meaning in these tasks devalued for centuries because women have performed them.

Here, brimming with child, how do I make my way toward a mature feminism, one that values both the difficulty of such an admission and a spirituality of the daily?

How do I hold more loosely to my anger? How do I grasp it tightly enough to remember the stunted opportunities of women past and present, yet loosely enough so that the light of God can shine through my fingers and into my dishwater and laundry basket?

It will not be easy. I have learned the theorems of capitalism and patriarchy all too well: (1) activities which produce income are valuable; (2) women who work at home don’t produce income; thus (3) “women’s work” is not valuable.

I will have trouble erasing the lines of my adolescent feminism, which made room only for career advancement. And I worry about Norris’ idea of housework as spiritual discipline becoming one more way of cajoling women into finding “contentment” only in domesticity.

Yet I find hope in her refusal to fall into dualism, her rejection of forced choice between “the life of the mind and a life of repetitive, burdensome work.” And while the mundane tasks of our everyday lives do not define us, Norris observes, they can remind us that “Christianity is inescapably down-to-earth and incarnational.”

There is grace here, I think—grace enough for a Gen-X feminist like me who finds herself pregnant, at home, without a real job. Grace enough for all of us, male and female, who desire to find meaning and hope—and perhaps even God—in our baskets full of dirty clothes and our sinks full of dishes.

I’m sitting on the futon, opening my mail, with my newborn son in my arms. He snuffles and squirms as I open the big brown envelope from my university and pull out my master’s diploma.

Suddenly its grand Latin phrases and self-important seal feel like messages from another life—a life I must have lived sometime before my reincarnation as diaper washer and milk machine. Who was the person who earned this degree, I wonder, who sat around in classrooms discussing poststructuralism and liberatory pedagogy? And what would she think of me, a baby in my lap and milk stains on my blouse?

Must I choose, I wonder as I glance from diploma to child, between a “life of the mind and life of repetitive, burdensome work,” as Norris puts it? I have hope that is a false dichotomy, a choice I will not need to make. I have hope that “repetition” can be salvaged as God-filled pattern and likewise “burdensome work” as redemptive labor.

Even with this hope, I imagine that I’ll still resent labeling myself on next year’s tax form, that I’ll still get frustrated when groups of women talk primarily of husbands and children. Indeed, millennia filled with social forces constraining women are not erased by one small epiphany of mine.

Yet I do hope my anger at labels and roles holds within it a seed of faith in the Word that made Itself flesh so as to experience the mundane and ordinary of this earth. I hope that my anger is infused with the peace that comes from knowing that God accompanies me in my daily routine—whether that includes sitting in a classroom, writing an essay, directing an organization, or changing a diaper.

Speaking of which. . . .

—Valerie Weaver-Zercher, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is a homemaker and also assistant editor of and columnist for DreamSeeker Magazine.