It’s International Women’s Day today, a ‘day’ we really shouldn’t need and yet clearly need more of. I say we shouldn’t need it because it’s ridiculous that there is a designated holiday to call attention to the merits and achievements of over half the human race; it’s a bit like having an oxygen appreciation day or a good night’s sleep festival. Without strong women we wouldn’t be here, they are fundamental to the species. Yet we live in this world, and not a better one, and one day is better than none.
I mention my disappointment at womankind’s lack of regular recognition because women are omnipresent in my life, and all of them are not merely strong and capable in their own rights, but integral to who I am and everything I do. While today might be a designated day of female retrospection, every day for me is one of gratitude. I don’t bring this up as a way of feminist virtue signaling, nor do I want to suggest that the women in my life are only validated by my own identity or approval. Rather, I’m writing because gender roles are something I think about regularly…and still grapple with.
All the primary women in my life, as I said, are ‘strong’ women (though even what that phrase means is nebulous). From my grandmother, mother, and aunt to my sister, mother-in-law, and wife, all have pursued careers, achieved their education, or worked full time, often while raising children. These women have been capable of feeding hogs, killing chickens, loading cattle, anatomizing medical cadavers, or wading daily into the murky frontier of the human emotional psyche. Of those tasks, I’d take poultry slaughter over psychotherapy any day. Women have raised me, loved me, looked after me, and helped me farm. While I’ve had male role models, women have always, in many ways, been the main role models. There have been more of them, for one thing, but they’ve also always been more willing to offer up their time and energy. And while it might make a certain amount of maternal sense that a grandmother would help raise her grandson, it takes a different kind of generosity for a mother to give up her retirement to help castrate piglets and collect eggs on her son’s farm. Likewise, it takes a remarkable amount of spirit for a woman to embrace a man’s quixotic vision and become his wife, knowing that his pursuits will make life harder, less stable, and great deal muddier. For me, gratitude comes daily.
But there has also been no small amount of struggle on my part to come to grips with what roles come next for me. My wife has taken on the role of the primary breadwinner in our relationship: her career offers reliability, health insurance, and a far bigger paycheck than my farm could ever supply. As we try to find balance between work and home life, it’s long been apparent to me that the demands of farming would need to be subsumed by the requirements of living as a married couple. I’ve begun to rebalance things, shrinking the farm in the hopes of making it more manageable, and taking on more household chores and responsibilities. As we approach the point of starting a family, my role will no doubt be redefined even more, as part time farmer, and more full time stay-at-home father. Odd then, in a way, that out of all these women who have worked while raising children, the closest anyone might come to being a dedicated, full time homemaker…might be me.
I won’t say that it isn’t taking some adjustment on my part. There’s egoism, for one thing, not so much when I think about this new adjusted norm on my own, but there is when I talk about my intent with others. The societal stigma of the man being the primary income for the household is still present, and I’m still susceptible to feeling undercut. There’s also a great deal of empathy to be felt for the work that’s traditionally been designated to women. Washing dishes, to my mind, will never be more than a form of drudgery, and even cooking, which I generally love, can become another source of stress when dinnertime approaches and the onions have yet to be chopped. The gender dynamic of the work/life balance doesn’t seem to get talked about enough in the farming community: the days when a man could farm while his wife tended house and baked pies seem about as antiquated as the buckboard plow. The new farm economy necessitates that either both partners work the farm together, or one farms while the other takes on a job of their own. Either way, the dishes will still sit there in the sink, caking and accusatory.
Ultimately, the greatest test and the greatest proving ground for me will be fatherhood. When I do bring a son or daughter into this world, how do I prepare them for what awaits? This is a world where we have the #metoo movement but also have a sexual predator in the White House, where we have RBG and AOC but they aren’t as famous as vacuous and waif-like Instagram models, where some talk about gender as a social construct while the societal repercussions of gender have almost never been starker. Raising a resilient young woman or a responsible young man feels incredibly daunting and immeasurably important. I could never do it alone, but thankfully I won’t have to. Today, and tomorrow, and every day of the year, I’ll be surrounded by strong women, and they seem to make anything possible.
The Edible Complex 