ANYBODY HOME? My mom is fond of recounting the story about me, age three, reenacting an old vaudeville skit with my dolls:
Deep, menacing landlord voice: You MUST pay the rent!
High-pitched girlie voice: I CAN'T pay the rent.
Landlord: You MUST pay the rent!
And the brilliant original conclusion: I CAN'T pay the rent...I'm a girl!
My mom, then a struggling single parent (and child psychology major at the UA, to boot) couldn't have helped but wonder where I got such ideas. Television? The child support checks Dad sent? Some ingrained socialization process stretching back to that male doctor who snipped the umbilical cord? Some twisted sense of humor? Personally, I like to think it's the latter. Steeping my childhood in deeply ingrained social biases makes me irritable.
It's certainly not for lack of trying on the Allgaier family front. I come from a long tradition of independent-minded women on my mom's side, from my late Great Aunt Jen who homesteaded in Idaho to my near and dear Aunt Ellen, who craftily gave me the doctor's kit and my older brother the nurse's kit in the fateful Christmas of '75--when we were supposedly still young and impressionable.
We immediately swapped, informing her that she'd made a mistake. Silly grown-ups.
But oh, look at me now! While I have no intentions of being any rank of medical professional, I have, to say the least, been paying the rent for many years.
What bothers me now is not the notion that I must support myself, but the increasingly nagging fear that I may have to support a husband. I am a young woman who has always billed herself as "born too late to be bitter," a stance of which I am sardonically proud. But while I may have inherited the fruits of the boomer-women's labor, I have also inherited an unforeseen by product: Gen-X Boys.
These are not characters on a Saturday morning cartoon (though not a bad idea), nor are they the material from which to categorize an entire generation. But make no mistake, they're out there--the men neither my traditional father nor my feminist forebears prepared me for: They are my supposed peers, my pool of potential soul mates...who don't want to work, let alone become part of "the establishment" (i.e., have a career), who want only to support me in mine by staying home with the kids.
"Whose kids?" I ask.
"Ours," and after a stony pause, "I mean, well, if we choose to have any."
Excuse me, but trading the role of June Cleaver for that of Ward still doesn't sound like we're coming out even.
If the notion of equality has been internalized as, "Relax, I'm totally non-threatened by your paying our rent,"
then forget feminine wiles, warriors...all you need are rubbers and plastic.
--Mari WadsworthHannah "Road Trip Warrior" Glasston's regular column returns next week.
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