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the way people pretended to care for him while they were really asking after themselves.
He thought about calling me or Seth, but it seemed
I was now what was called a stay-at-home mother, a temporary occupation with no prospect of promotion that worked so hard to differentiate itself from job-working that it confined me to semantic house arrest, though certainly I was allowed to carpool and go to the store. When I told people what I did, they’d say, “Being a mother is the hardest job there is.” But it wasn’t. The hardest job there was was being a mother and having an actual job, with pants and a commuter train pass and pens and lipstick.
No one had to tell me it was harder to have a job and be a mother. It was obvious. It was two full-time occupations. It’s just math. Because having a job made you no less of a mother; you still had to do all that shit, too.
But the only reason it’s tolerated is that everyone knows it’s just a lie we tell to girls to make their marginalization bearable. They know that eventually the girls will be punished for their futures, so they let them wear their dumb message shirts now.
