You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

The Wife—The Mother, The Finder—would love to be someone who doesn’t give a fuck, or who at least gives considerably fewer fucks, but she is not that person. That’s not how she was built. The Wife’s factory setting is GAF. She gives so many fucks. All the fucks.

Looking at it, I thought, No wonder so many divorced men get remarried right away and so many divorced women stay on their own. I saw something I’m still trying to process: My life looked surprisingly like my mother’s. My mother didn’t go to college, married at twenty, and had me at twenty-four. I went to college and graduate school, published my first book and got married at twenty-eight (at which age she already had three children), and had my children in my thirties. Still, still, my life looked a lot like hers. I don’t say this with frustration because my mother’s life isn’t a good, beautiful life—it is! If you ask her, she’ll tell you she wanted to be a mother more than anything else in the world. That’s what she wanted to be when she grew up: a mom. No, I say this with frustration because I saw myself and my husband as different—more progressive, more equal in our household, both with graduate degrees, both respected in our fields—but were we? The division of labor in our home told a different story. I was angry at myself, and more than a little ashamed, that I allowed this to happen, and that I had unwittingly modeled to Violet and Rhett what women’s work was—the baking of class Valentine’s treats, the pairing of socks, the buying and wrapping of gifts, the packing of school lunches and camp snacks, the applying of sunscreen. Caregiving.

Exactly.