Friday Favourite #13
Who's picking up the domestic tab...?
Every Friday I share a favourite song, poem, book, film, or other kind of cultural reference that evokes the feeling of home—and what it means to me. Let me know how it makes you feel in the comments below!
Hello, Friends. Finally, February. And it’s time for another poem, although this one aches in a different way to the first one I shared. Sometimes we have to come at the feeling of home from the harder side of things, and Adrienne Rich does this superbly in one of her early poems, LIVING IN SIN. I want to share it here because it does a powerful job of cleaving apart fantasy and reality, and nowhere is this delineation more important than in matters of love and life at home.
Let’s take the poem in full:
Living in Sin She had thought the studio would keep itself— no dust upon the furniture of love. Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal, the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears, a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat stalking the picturesque amusing mouse had risen at his urging. Not that at five each separate stair would writhe under the milkman's tramp; that morning light so coldly would delineate the scraps of last night's cheese and three sepulchral bottles; that on the kitchen shelf among the saucers a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own-- envoy from some village in the moldings... Meanwhile, he, with a yawn, sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard, declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror, rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes; while she, jeered by the minor demons, pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found a towel to dust the table-top, and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove. By evening she was back in love again, though not so wholly but throughout the night she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming like a relentless milkman up the stairs. Adrienne Cecile Rich - The New Yorker, January 23, 1954 P. 80
I’m reading this poem again at my desk, before dawn. These days, if my children haven’t woken me up then my brain inevitably does and I wait, restless, for the daylight to come. Sometimes it’s just easier to call it quits and get up for the day even when it still feels like night. After all, there is no shortage of things to be getting on with.
Last year, my husband bought me a book called The Baby on the Fire Escape by Julie Phillips. It’s an exploration of what it means to be a mother who is also an artist, wrestling with what the author calls the “mind-baby problem”. It was a perfect book at a transitional time, given I had just completed the manuscript for my first book whilst looking after our newborn son during the bulk of the working week. I certainly had some thoughts on the mind-baby problem for creative mothers like myself.
At the heart of the book are the stories of several profoundly successful, complicated, challenging, brave, audacious, disruptive and creative women, all of whom produced substantial bodies of work during the twentieth century whilst they also became mothers. One of the women featured is the American feminist poet Adrienne Rich who wrote her way through some of the most essential—if unanswerable—questions about gender roles and relationships and their many intersections with society and politics. She did substantial amounts of this work whilst she raised three kids. She almost certainly wrote a lot before dawn.
Adrienne Rich would have had a fair few thoughts on the mind-baby problem, I’m sure. She undoubtedly had some thoughts on the double standards afforded to men and women when it comes to all kinds of relational roles, and her poem, Living in Sin, casts this discrepancy into the most familiar of spaces—a home shared by a couple. It’s a tight glare at an old problem: the fantasy of shacking up with one’s lover, and the reality of keeping house together. Layer onto that the social norms and expectations about who does what when it comes to the domestic side of things, and we find ourselves in Rich’s reality— making the bed and dusting the surfaces whilst her boyfriend “shrugged at the mirror” and went off to get a packet of cigarettes.
Nowadays we have sharpened vocabulary and terminology to describe what invariably happens between men and women who live together, namely the distinctly unequal allocation of the mental load. Wide ranging research has confirmed what plenty of women—and particularly mothers—have known for a very long time, that those living together in heterosexual relationships typically do more of the domestic chores than their male partners, and perform far more cognitive and emotional labour. I’ve seen it in the research behind the IKEA Life at Home Report and I feel it in my own relationship. This is not a public criticism of my husband, who is an extremely capable and loving father and partner who takes responsibility for our homelife, but an acknowledgement of something which permeates life at home like rising damp—seemingly impossible to remove, no matter how hard you try.
There is the intoxicating thrill of living with your new lover, and the “morning light so coldly” throwing into relief the drudgery of their dirty dishes and discarded laundry. Who will tend to the home that you have pieced together? It’s a question that so many of us fail to ask out loud before we sign the lease or the mortgage with someone, because it has an answer that barely needs saying. The girlfriend, the wife, the mother, of course.
Rich’s poem is all the more provocative given the time in which it was written. In 1954, when this was first published, the All-American family was at the heart of a culture war that pitted traditional values against the rise of communism. Women were strongly encouraged to marry rather than pursue education, and without effective birth control they were locked into decades of childbearing with little recourse. Living with your boyfriend, engaging in premarital sex… certainly this was living in sin, at the time. But it was also, as Rich deftly captures, nothing like the frothing bacchanalian images people brought to mind of such a situation. Even women who renounced one gendered expectation (marriage) were having to perform another (housewife). You might defy cultural norms, but you still need to pick up the domestic tab. I think that was the point Rich wanted to make.
I love Rich’s poignant details of her staged fantasy—the plate of pears, the Persian shawl on the piano—as if mocking the absurdity of a home that couldn’t possibly go the way of the others, full of dust and grime and moldering scraps. That’s the horror of cleaning up, it never fucking ends. Throw kids into the mix and you’re just trying to push water up a hill every single day. The most my husband and I can do sometimes is stand in the middle of the living room, surveying the absolute barnyard we appear to have moved into, and laugh. Then I go and do some deep breathing in the kitchen before I unload the dishwasher, put away the laundry, sterilize the baby bottles, water the plants, put away the shopping, wipe my daughter’s butt, feed the cat, clean the bathroom, and start preparing dinner. I, too, am “jeered by those minor demons”.
We will have many relational roles in our lives, from child to parent to friend to colleague, and all shades in between—but the most defining will be the relational role which leads our life at home. Rich understood, as she powerfully depicts in her poem, that we may love the people we choose to live with but take issue with the gendered role we have to play for them in the home. After all, the way we feel about our home has a profound effect on how we feel about ourselves. It’s the mind-baby problem, but perhaps it’s also a mind-home problem.
I take some comfort in Rich’s poem, even though—on the face of it—it’s hella depressing. It reminds me that we’ll keep falling in love, again and again, with the very people who might also drive us to distraction at home. That we have to fight the good fight on multiple fronts. And that it’s possible to make art all the while.
What a poem. As a new mother and wife, I relate to it on a deeper level. Trying to figure out what I want next in my career while simultaneously taking care of the house, myself, feed our son, and be a decent human.
Beautiful piece, Katie.