- labor day weekend - watched the hours - the threat of the mundane -

celia bought a house, so i watched abby & noah while Lynn, Linda & Jeff helped strip floors, paint ceilings, etc...

we (the kids and i) had a good time. i introduced a new character to them -- a guy by the name of "Fester" -- who, for those of you from *back* in the day, must be related to "Herman." Everybody loved him. They loved the fact that I denied knowledge of his existence and that he only arrived when I left the room, but when Fester accidentally sprinkled water over their heads (he's a clumsy guy) -- Noah freaked. it became clear that Fester's presence and/or my schizophrenia about the whole thing had been nurturing a fabric of fear.

on the way back from celia's house I thought about blogging about feminism -- i've never heard celia use the word -- but lynn and she and i together mourned the cedarville torch that celebrated "God's Plan for Men and Women" and laid out the women's section in pink showing her carrying a laundry basket, pushing a vacuum and caring for kids -- while the men's blue section showed him returning from his white collar job and in another photo fixing the garage door opener.

when i woke up this morning i didn't feel as much like blogging that --

even though I thought that watching _the hours_ last night would make me feel that way. I do recommend the book with two thumbs up. I thought the movie was good, but not the kind of movie that I recommend to all audiences. If you're of the PBS / BBC / Merchant-Ivory persuasion, you should definitely see it.

but it didn't -- the movie didn't convince me to blog about feminism, that is. It convinced me to blog about something else. Which I'll return to in a moment after I go ahead and argue against that torch for a moment.

I've already set up this "issue" in my mass media class -- by suggesting that the traditional structure of the home whereby a woman stays at her home and cares for her children while the husband goes out to a job, works an eight hour day and returns home in the evening is more a product of the industrial revolution than it is of scripture.

(i know that i'm blogging to the choir for many of you)

But these pictures in the Torch just pointed up some of the most egregious "sins" at the cultural level of this system. That a woman's entire day be filled up with "invisible repeatable tasks" (care for the domestic sphere) and that that work be linked somehow to her (own personal and that of those around her's) evaluation of her ability to be "a good mother" -- seems ludicrous and wrong to me.

I do think that good parenting for mothers and fathers does include accessibility. And I'm happy to Prophecy against the cultural narrative that separates parents from children just to maintain a pattern of acquisition and consumption. That's *another* cultural metanarrative that I find myself resistant to -- the endless importance of consumption for purposes of identity formation and leisure pursuit.

But its fathers as much as mothers that need to be *present* in the lives of their children. AND the idea that a woman is responsible *only* for her own family seems another byproduct of this system that is deeply wrong. Women *need* (as much as and in the same way as a man needs) to cultivate their gifts and callings in contexts which allow them to impact some portion of the world.

Whence comes this rant?

Years and years and suburbs upon suburbs of people who use religion to prop up the traditional work-model of the nuclear family? yes, partly. the ongoing exhaustion and frustration of trying to shape a life where both parents make room within their jobs and careers for children WHILE also pushing both careers forward *but in a world with no models* and a world where there is little *systemic support / institutional support* for such choices? yes, partly. the fact that i just heard through the grapevine that one of my bright students, just starting her career is going to quit her new job because she unexpectedly got honeymoon pregnant? yes, partly (I didn't hear any discussion about what her husband would do with his job.) the fact that when i ask (some of) my friends if they've considered paternity leave once their babies are born they look at me like i must surely be joking...

BUt I decided not to blog about feminism, remember?

Because as I watched the hours and watched the torture that each woman felt their life to be -- just because it had been constrained in ways that they did not expect nor want --

I was again focused on how broken the whole world is. How disappointed everyone is. How much we want, and how little we have. How disconnected we all are from the people who mabye could meet us in a *real meeting* way.

I was moved by the way that, in the film, *touch* was the transcendent opportunity that everyone had.

I was thinking that we walk around in our worlds filled with invisible lepers and all of us have hands that heal just a little bit if we can bother to / find a way to / defy conventions of "appropriateness" by *touching* one another.

...but i'll have to leave off in the middle of the sentence because two toddlers are suddenly awake and feeling needy. ah the irony...

~peace.