I thought you might like the toys I had liked, Lite-Brite and Operation, or Barbie, whose hair I used to hack off with a knife and whose tiny nose I’d pierced with a safety pin. At the age of three, though, you found your one true love, which you would cling to with the single-minded devotion of a life-mating swan: the tiny interconnected blocks whose Danish name translates to “play well.” You became a Lego man.
In truth, you became a Lego obsessive. You slept with your Lego catalogues under your pillow and carried them to school every day, their covers taped and re-taped. Your room became filled with hundreds of Lego mini figures — vampires, wizards, construction workers, Indiana Jones with his tiny whip — and your shelves crammed with the elaborate sets you got for birthdays and Christmas. If you ever needed to be bribed, we knew which bribe would always work. We had a loyalty card at the Lego store. We almost had to take out a second mortgage. Lego is not an inexpensive hobby. Many days I wished you’d stuck with the stuffed cob of corn.
Your awkwardness, the difficulties you had at school, they all vanished when you sat in front of a new Lego set. Some of them were astonishingly complex, their instruction manuals the size of a phone book. And yet, patiently and with remarkable concentration, you rapidly built each one: Hogwarts and Batman’s cave and the pièce de résistance, which nearly bankrupted us, the Death Star, complete with a garbage room to crush mini figures Luke and Leia and Han.
Even now, as a handsome and wise teenager, the Death Star sits on your bookshelf. I think you still find it comforting, the way it all snaps together so perfectly, the way it can always be repaired. It adheres to the plan set out in its instruction manual; it follows a pattern; it makes sense. I think you like it for those reasons.
Here’s the part I wish you didn’t have to discover: The world isn’t nearly as neat or comforting. You’re already discovering it. I know, because I talk to you about what you read on reddit and 4chan, what you see on YouTube. You understand that it is chaotic out there, not just for girls, but for boys, too. There is longing and confusion, and the fact is that you’re all alone in your bedrooms, electronically connected by this longing and confusion. In my day, at least teenagers had the mall.
I’m not sure that it’s ever been as easy for boys as I imagined. The great American feminist bell hooks put it best when she said that patriarchy has no gender. She says about boys: “Patriarchy will not heal them. If that were so they would all be well.” (I’m giving you her book Feminism Is for Everybody for Christmas, by the way. Please act surprised.)
Boys have been just as crushed and exploited by institutional sexism as girls have. Ask a boy who grew up gay or transgender in the 1940s or 50s; ask an old man if he felt, as a child, that he was encouraged to be a nurse or a kindergarten teacher. Ask him if he felt he could have stayed home to look after the kids. Boys have been suffocated by expectations, too.
The forces that built the patriarchy are reluctant to abandon the fort. They’re clinging to the vestiges of poisonous masculinity as a weapon, even as that weapon threatens to destroy everyone. Boys are still told not to cry. They are told to “man up” as a way of avoiding their very real fears. Crucially, they are given no useful ways to deal with the anger and frustration created by a chaotic world.
And now the world seems particularly in pieces, and we are in a state of flux. Boys and young men are flung around by forces beyond their control. Women are still the victims of systemic discrimination, but we are making great strides, and men are still not entirely sure how to respond to a landscape that shifts before their eyes. The manual that their grandfathers were given is in tatters. Some men adapt; some respond with rage. I don’t need to tell you that; you spend enough time online to know.
We used to keep your Lego manuals and catalogues in a desk, do you remember? They filled several drawers. Occasionally it would occur to me to throw them out, but then I’d think, What if a piece falls off Ninjago: Temple of the Ultimate Weapon? I mean, we had to sell your sister to buy that set. (I’m kidding! We only had to sell the cat.) Anyway, we would have been in a pickle if I’d thrown those manuals out. You would have been filled with frustration and anxiety, not knowing where the pieces went. You always liked to know the path ahead.
And I can’t give you that anymore; the instruction manuals are gone. It fills me with more worry than I can say. The world seems more Jenga than Lego these days — teetering, haphazard, prone to collapse. Maybe all mothers through history have felt this way about the future, but it does seem a particularly confusing road ahead and the maps all written in vanishing ink.
You’re lucky, Griff. You are like your dad: observant, even-keeled, intent on understanding how things work. You’re lucky to have your dad, as a presence and role model. Look to him and you’ll see how to be a good man. Look to your grandfather and your uncles and cousins. They all have something to teach about compassion and strength.
But in the end, you’ll have to create your own manual for this life. I know you’d like to be able to flip ahead to the last page, to see a safe and solid and air-tight construction, something that will last and not fail, but that’s not the way things work. I trust you, though. I trust you to be able to build something worthwhile and true, even on shaky ground.
Your loving Mum
UNBALANCED
One evening, I find myself at a parents’ council meeting at my children’s school. It’s a particularly hairy time at work and I don’t really have the hours to spare, but I am experiencing a rare phase of can-doism, so I give in to the impulse. I really should volunteer more at school, I think, in the same way I think I should take up some form of exercise before my limbs atrophy and I’m reduced to one large ambulatory texting thumb.
We sit in a library that smells of cheese sandwiches, and I am the outlander. All the other parents are very kind, but they know each other already and are united in common purpose. The treasurer stands up to deliver his report. He clears his throat with some embarrassment. The number-one item on his agenda has to do with a deadbeat parent who’s written an NSF cheque for the school’s chocolate-bar fundraiser. The cheque bounced, incurring a $10 fee from the bank. Now the question is whether the council goes after this scofflaw to reclaim the original amount plus the bank’s fee.
There is a horrified murmuring among the parents: They say bounced cheque in the same tones they might have once whispered gonorrhea. Bounced cheque! On a school fundraising drive! I am sitting there, half-listening, eyes on the snow falling in the darkness outside, when suddenly a blade of horror cuts through my reverie. I think of the notice I got from my bank. I think of the chocolates that have not arrived home with my daughter. The equation is stark: I am the deadbeat parent.
Slowly, I put up my hand. They turn to me, and suddenly they are the hostile farm folk in Children of the Corn.
“It was me,” I manage to say. The treasurer looks at me blankly. “It was me,” I repeat. “The cheque. It was my fault. It was an old chequebook — a defunct account — I should have thrown it out —”
No one says anything. They are mortified on my behalf. I am also mortified, but indignant. “I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s my fault. But I’ve been so busy . . .” It is the wrong this to say. It’s like telling a roomful of alcoholics that the beer looked so good. They are all busy. They did not write cheques on defunct accounts.
I slink out of the meeting and return, the next day, with a fresh payment for the charity chocolates — including the $10 bank charge. I am too embarrassed to ever show my face at parents’ council again.
What would I say to them, if I had returned? That I was sorry? That I had tried, for years, to operate with a wire-walker’s single-minded sense of purpose, but I was more Lucy Ricardo than graceful acrobat? That I had made the mistake of looking down and became unbalanced, and was falling? Why should I expect sympathy? They were all on the wire, too, with a baby on one hip and a shopping list in the other
. The flailing was universal.
That evening of humiliation was the beginning of a realization, though: Maybe, to paraphrase Hamlet, the flailing is all. Maybe the flailing is life in full.
FOR THOUSANDS OF years, balance has been considered an ideal to pursue — but so, too, were other ideals, such as moral rectitude and piety. Those fallen away, we are left with balance as the shimmering modern grail, always just slightly out of reach. The irony is that the harder we struggle for it, the shakier the wire beneath us becomes, and the farther away the ground seems.
Now, of course, the discussion has been hijacked to mean “work–life balance” because the media conversation is dominated by people like me, who are in the scary middle of life, where there are many mirrors reflecting back our reality and none of them is flattering. All our metaphors involve frantic motion: juggling, running, flying, drowning. “I’m run off my pins!” I shriek down the phone at a well-meaning friend who asks how I am. We find weird comfort in our useless, circular motions, perhaps fearing that, like log-rolling lumberjacks, if we actually stop we’ll drown.
The phrase “work–life balance” has been in use for nearly three decades. In 1991, the Wharton School of Business founded the Work/Life Integration Project, and ever since has been issuing sober reports about the need for more caring, flexible, intuitive workplaces. And yet the wire keeps jiggling: Blame the stormy economy. Blame the gorgeous distractions of technology. Don’t look down.
You would need another lifetime to read all the books about work–life balance, never mind the studies, never mind the research. The quest for it is now yet another thing to be anxious about. Go ahead and read “Work–Life Conflict in Canada in the New Millennium” (2003) and feel your heart palpitate in anxiety and recognition. The authors of the study surveyed nearly 32,000 Canadians who worked in medium and large companies, and found 60 percent of them were experiencing high levels of “role overload” — having too much to do and not enough time to do it. I did not take to my fainting couch in surprise to learn that female respondents were more likely than men to report an excess of stress brought on by role overload.
Once, the equilibrium we sought was meant to be internal. The ancient Greeks wanted everything to be in perfect harmony — your wet and dry ingredients, your vapours and fluids, your bravery and restraint.
“Nothing in excess,” said the Oracle at Delphi.
“The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us,” said Euripides, or at least we think he did, in one of the fragments that has survived (no one bothered to Tumblr their thoughts in those days).
The Greeks gave us the idea of the bodily humours in sync (eucrasia) and out of joint (dyskrasia). There were four humours, and in each personality a balance existed, depending on which particular juices were dominant: You could be melancholic (black bile), choleric (yellow bile), sanguine (blood), or phlegmatic (I think you can guess the fluid). Illness and emotional turmoil were the result of an imbalance in humours.
It’s tempting to see the mania for self-quantification — the lifeblogging and the Fitbits and the wristwatch heart monitor — as the modern equivalent of the Greeks’ search for equilibrium. Run five more kilometres and eat ten fewer grams of carbs and you, too, can achieve a golden state of harmony. At least until the next cookie beckons.
For the Greeks and the Elizabethans, balance was an internal mechanism affected by external factors: age, season, temperature. But for us, the concept is flipped on its head: Balance is not so much about what’s inside as what’s outside. It becomes about juggling competing demands on your time, and competing interests. It is about trying to keep twenty plates in the air, in the dark, with a small person clutching your leg.
In our swim-class-versus-project-deadline solipsism, we forget about all the other people seeking equilibrium: the grieving, the ill, the lonely, the poor, the terminally exhausted. I use “we” recklessly here, because what I’m really talking about are women who have the privilege of creating frenzy through the stacking of play dates and networking engagements and yoga classes: We can afford chaos. The really harried women are the ones who juggle several jobs, work split shifts, and do not have the cushion of private health insurance to break their fall. These are the women who are too busy to complain about being busy.
Years ago in London I interviewed Nicola Horlick, a high-profile fund manager and mother of five who was the obsession of London media: She wore heels and had a brood of children and managed assets and still the top of her head hadn’t popped off! When I suggested to her that she deserved a cape and a red S on her chest, she shot me down, politely but witheringly: “The fact of the matter is that I would regard a woman living in a council estate who’s a single mother because the man in her life has decided to leave her with three children, who has to work to support the children, who has no child maintenance, who lives in a tower block on the top floor with no lift — that’s a superwoman.”
Of course, she was right. And it’s not just that we can afford chaos, but that chaos enriches our status. We are warriors of turmoil, and each added activity in a day, no matter how meaningless, provides an affirmation: The midnight lights in my kitchen illuminate tomorrow’s bake-sale Nanaimo bars, just as they do in my neighbour’s and all the houses on our street. Look at our industry. Feel the damp armpits of our accomplishment.
At some point, this juggling act has become a competition: I can keep thirty plates in the air. No, forty! As Brigid Schulte writes in her superb book Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time: “Busyness is now the social norm that people feel they must conform to . . . or risk being outcasts.” Schulte’s book came out around the same time I was bouncing a cheque for the school fundraising drive; moving my family from one house to another; frantically rewriting the last bits of my first novel; raising two children; teaching a university course; working full-time as a journalist; shouting at my poor husband; and doing it all badly — except for the shouting part, at which I excelled.
Her book arrived like a gift from the goddess: Here, finally, was someone — a fellow journalist! — who felt as if she were doing too much, most of it haphazardly, and ruining her children along the way. Except that Schulte decided to do something about it: She would try “to get a handle on the contours of the crazy jangle of modern life, a state of being so intense that I had come to think of it as the Overwhelm.”
Schulte’s search for a solution to the Overwhelm took her to fancy restaurants in Paris (where she felt underdressed) and dads’ groups in America and conferences around the world. And she came to a conclusion that I had started to come to, as well: Busyness is an addiction. Frenzy is a crutch we use to prop up our frail egos.
During her research, she visited Ann Burnett, a professor of communications and director of the Women and Gender Studies program at North Dakota State University, who studies round-robin Christmas letters for clues to how we transmit this particular anxiety-status to our loved ones. The letters, increasingly, are full of words like “hectic,” “frantic,” “whirlwind,” and “consumed.” It’s boasting disguised as lament.
“My God,” the professor told Schulte, after showing her the Christmas letters, “people are competing about being busy. It’s about showing status. That if you’re busy, you’re important. You’re leading a full and worthy life. There’s a ‘busier than thou’ attitude, that if you’re not as busy as the Joneses, you’d better get cracking.”
I finished reading Schulte’s book and reached out to friends about their search for balance (most had abandoned the search, and were instead drinking brandy from the rescue dog’s collar). One of them, a single mother of two energetic boys, put it this way: “That exact moment when I feel I am juggling too many plates I ask myself, ‘Why am I doing this? Who am I doing this for? Am I trying to be perceived as “busy” so that people will approve of me? Am I trying to prove my se
lf-worth? Am I insecure about the way I am raising my children? Am I trying to please someone?’”
Another wise woman said: “Is there some magical still spot that I can settle into in the eye of the storm? I think so, but I can’t seem to stay in it very long. I find it at yoga and during morning walks . . . and then I lose it at work and end up looking for it in the fridge all night. I figure I ain’t never gonna find it, so I might as well chill about being out of whack most of the time.”
Chill out about being out of whack. Her words echoed in my ears as I sat down to dinner one night with my husband and children. We try to do this several times a week. The kids invariably want to sit in front of the TV watching The Simpsons, and sometimes we cave. Mostly we do not, and it’s for my sake more than theirs, because I find it calming to cook, bizarre though it seems, and even more calming to sit with them and stare into the eyes of the people I love, brown eyes and brown eyes and blue eyes. Even when those eyes are rolling at me in exasperation.
On that night, I was trying to do ten other things, all of them badly. I had two speeches to write. There were 6,587 unread emails in my inbox, and Microsoft was threatening to cut my electronic umbilical cord. Unlike the people in Schulte’s book, I didn’t feel smug. I just felt slightly nauseated, because there was a mysterious message written on my hand and I had no idea what it said.
I am constantly writing notes on my hand because all the remembering-places in my head are full. My husband invariably shakes his head when he sees my sullied hand and reminds me of the Google family calendar he has lovingly set up on my computer. I wished I’d listened to him: The combination of my terrible handwriting and indelible ink combined to foil my best intentions. There was an important message scrawled on my body, in Sharpie, but I couldn’t read it. This was doubly tormenting: My body would forever be branded with my lack-wittedness.
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