Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  “It’s good, only,” she replied lightly. “That’s how she’ll learn.”

  Mary was the dream worker for a dystopian world. She was an institutional product; a migrant without yearnings. Her lack of guilt or emotional conflict made it easier for me, and for my family. If Mary didn’t mind, why should we?

  A gun for hire; a mercenary mother. Mary was a guilt-free tool of some lucky woman’s advancement—mine, as it turns out.

  * * *

  ————

  Of course, it wasn’t only me; it wasn’t only us. There are so many other mothers like me. There are so many other mothers like Xiao Li, Mary, and Pooja.

  The same story echoes around the globe. It’s the story of every woman who becomes a mother and still wants to earn her pay. How can we succeed at jobs when there is so much work at home? How can we raise our children when we are so busy with our jobs? (Or, as women like me prefer to say, our careers. The career is a very useful abstraction, I’ve learned, since you can continue to have a career even when you don’t have a job.) Our minds go to the same places—our partners, and when they fail us, who can we hire, and if we can’t afford to hire, then who can we otherwise press into service, what grandmother or aunt or neighbor?

  I could fill an entire book with numbers, parades of facts all marching in the same direction.

  The statistics tell us what we already know—women are doing most of the work, even in America. It’s not an ambiguous truth. I can locate no data suggesting otherwise. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Labor found that American women spend twice as much time cooking and cleaning as men, and three times as much time doing laundry.

  Into this global truth of women doing all the work flows the solution of hiring domestic workers: the International Labour Organization believes there are as many as one hundred million domestic workers in the world, and their ranks swell every day. Who are these workers? They are mostly (80 percent) women, and many of them (17 percent) are migrants.

  The numbers tell a story of global income inequality, spikes in migration, rural decimation, and the explosion of increasingly dysfunctional urban centers. People abandon their dying villages to find work. They get to the cities and wind up working in other people’s households. These women migrant workers are crucial because they solve a conundrum: middle-class and wealthy women demand a place in the job market—or at least a measure of leisure commensurate with their social ranking—but their male partners don’t want to do more housework.

  So they hire another woman, and, in many cases, they hire a woman from someplace else. From Latin America, if they live in the United States. From impoverished villages, if they live in a big city in Asia. From Africa, if they live in Italy. From the Philippines, if they live practically anywhere at all.

  People sometimes talk about poor women as if they were another product that should be moved to market, like underwear from Bangladesh or mobile phones from China. One day a thirtysomething American woman I know—single, white, unmarried, successful, city-dwelling—posted an article on Facebook about how shockingly difficult it is to raise babies. “That’s why we need to import cheap nannies!” one of her friends replied.

  I never hear anybody point out the plainest truth: that this model for women’s emancipation depends, itself, upon a permanent underclass of impoverished women.

  But of course these stories are not only about women—they also scream the reality of men who manage to duck not only the labor itself, but the surrounding guilt and recrimination. All those well-meaning men who say progressive things in public and then retreat into private to coast blissfully on the disproportionate toil of women.

  In the end, the answer is the men. They have to do the work. They have to do the damn work! Why do we tie ourselves in knots to avoid saying this one simple truth? It’s a daily and repetitive and eternal truth, and it’s a dangerous truth, because if we press this point we can blow our households to pieces, we can take our families apart, we can spoil our great love affairs. This demand is enough to destroy almost everything we hold dear. So we shut up and do the work.

  No single task is ever worth the argument. Scrub a toilet, wash a few dishes, respond to the note from the teacher, talk to another mother, buy the supplies. Don’t make a big deal out of everything. Don’t make a big deal out of anything. Never mind that, writ large, all these minor chores are the reason we remain stuck in this depressing hole of pointless conversations and stifled accomplishment. Never mind that we are still, after all these waves of feminism and intramural arguments among the various strains of womanhood, treated like a natural resource that can be guiltlessly plundered. Never mind that the kids are watching. If you mind you might go crazy.

  Cooking and cleaning and childcare are everything. They are the ultimate truth. They underpin and enable everything we do. The perpetual allocation of this most crucial and inevitable work along gender lines sets up women for failure and men for success. It saps the energy and burdens the brains of half the population.

  And yet honest discussion of housework is still treated as a taboo.

  For all her advice about holding one’s place at work, this is a realm that Sheryl Sandberg has mostly managed to sidestep. Instead of addressing directly the employment of domestic workers in her home, she has pointed out that men aren’t asked that question. By implication, since men aren’t asked, she shouldn’t have to answer. And she’s half right—men aren’t asked that question. But this is a dodge. Men ought to be asked. Everyone ought to be asked. Who’s cooking the food, who’s minding the kids, who’s scrubbing the toilets?

  How do you manage to be out in the world, and if you are here, who is there?

  * * *

  ————

  We’ll be leaving India soon. Our time is running out. I have the feeling Mary senses our departure, that she can read our family the way sailors read the tides and skies. She’s seen this cycle before.

  Just as Tom was negotiating his next job, Mary got sick. She burned with fever; she threw up; she couldn’t control her bowels.

  She kept offering weakly to come to work, and I kept ordering her to stay home. I sent water and packets of rehydration salts back to her room. I called her every day and tried to convince her to go to a doctor. Every day she declined.

  I didn’t push. I had other problems. The housekeeper was sick, too, so I scurried around cleaning and cooking and washing the clothes and shopping for food. I was taking care of Patrick, who’d also come down with a virus. I knew that Mary’s daughter was staying with her, and I figured that was enough—another adult, albeit a young adult, keeping watch. Mary asked for diarrhea medicine, which I sent. But the days slid past, and she wasn’t getting better.

  Meanwhile, I was in barely suppressed agony. My book edits were due, and those two weeks were supposed to be a stretch of intense work. I begged Tom to take a few days off, even one day, even half a day. He insisted that he couldn’t; he had deadlines of his own. I wrote groggily after the kids went to bed. When Tom was home on the weekend I holed up in cafés with my laptop. I needed childcare. I needed Mary.

  I was keenly aware that I’d been tripped up, yet again, by the very things I was writing about. How easily Mary and I had changed from two women whose needs synced up neatly (my need for childcare, Mary’s need for money) into two women with desperate problems they couldn’t solve for each other. It happened just like that, overnight, with no warning or backup plan for either of us.

  A week after Mary first fell ill, I was walking home from a long Saturday of work in coffeehouses. Winter soot blew in drifts over the city; a faint wind stirred the leaves like a comb through hair. I was coming around the corner to our house when I heard a quiet voice: “Hello, Madame.”

  I jumped a bit, and there was Mary, limping along with a sack dangling heavily from her wrist. Her face was grayish and bloated.

 
“Mary! How are you feeling?”

  “Better.” She spoke softly, like a small girl. “I could walk a little so I went to buy bananas and cucumbers.”

  “Are you still having diarrhea?”

  “Yes, too much.”

  “Okay, so the bananas are good, but don’t eat those cucumbers. Cucumbers are a diuretic. They will make you worse.”

  “I called a chemist,” she said, using the common Indian term for pharmacist. “He said to eat bananas and cucumbers.”

  “Yeah, but listen, he’s wrong. Bananas, yes; cucumbers, no.” I was trying to help. I sounded aggressive.

  She half nodded and dropped her eyes.

  “You look terrible,” I said.

  “I couldn’t walk until today. I kept having accidents in my pants. The neighbors complained because the smell from my toilet was so bad. They thought there was a dead rat. Then I told them, no, I’m sick, so they made us clean the bathroom and the drain because, you know, they said, ‘We will all get sick.’ ”

  “Oh my God.” This was much bleaker than I’d imagined. “Why did you want to come to work today?”

  “I thought…” She trailed off.

  “Mary,” I said. “You are not going to lose your job. Okay? But please don’t come until you can eat normal food.”

  “Okay.”

  “Why wouldn’t you go to a doctor?”

  “I didn’t think I could come down the stairs.”

  “You didn’t think you could get out of the house?”

  “I thought, I will die here. My head was spinning. I could hardly sit for toilet.”

  “But you kept saying you were getting better and you didn’t need a doctor. That’s not the same thing.” I reeled with the familiar mingling of tenderness and frustration. “We could have helped you down. You are supposed to let me know what’s going on!”

  “Sorry, Madame.”

  “No, it’s not— Listen. I think you need to go to the hospital. Go home and rest, okay? I’ll call you.”

  I walked home in a daze, mulling the gravity of Mary’s condition. I’d assumed she’d been suffering from a particularly tenacious stomach bug, nothing out of the ordinary. Now I realized we’d been lucky she hadn’t died.

  Mary always led me to believe that Delhi brimmed with friends and relatives and church acquaintances, that she had a rich and deep support system. But I could see for myself that, in her time of need, she’d been alone. She’d thought she might die, and nobody had come.

  I should have checked on her, I thought now. I should have overcome my reluctance to involve myself in Mary’s private matters. I didn’t want to infantilize her; I didn’t want to slide into some kind of neo-feudalism. I’d imagined how I’d feel if I called in sick only to have my boss show up at my door. But now it was clear to me that I’d been responsible for Mary, like it or not, and by local standards I’d shirked my duties. In the unspoken, let alone unwritten, contract of our employment relationship, it had been my job to take charge.

  And yet this made no sense at all. I was in no position to take care of Mary. This difficulty was built into our relationship: her moments of crisis were guaranteed to find me overwhelmed by the loss of childcare and logistical support.

  I’d already cataloged the downside of depending upon impoverished women, but never had the limitations of employment in my house been more obvious. Just as Mary was not a day care and couldn’t guarantee a steady flow of childcare, I was not a company that could offer benefits and insurance and broader social protection. I didn’t have a human resources department. We were just two people who’d tried to cobble together an arrangement that was mutually beneficial.

  When it came right down to it, we were each on our own.

  That’s why ad hoc domestic labor is, ultimately, a bunk system. It’s a jerry-rigged, flaw-riddled compromise that will never live up to its promise of upward mobility for one woman and personalized childcare for another.

  I sent Mary to the hospital. And, after a few days of antibiotics and decent medical care, she’d mostly recovered.

  I was left shaken. Mary and I had been in different chambers of the same household. We’d needed each other, but we couldn’t help or even see each other. So we’d languished in parallel, together but separate, needing and not receiving, trapped in the rooms we had chosen with the hopes of brighter circumstances.

  And I kept thinking, there has to be something better.

  * * *

  ————

  Mary has changed in the years since she came to our house. Her body is thicker and slower. Her face is more round and weathered. Her eyes are failing; she can no longer read stories to the kids unless the print is big. Her knees and back are stiff. She limps.

  The children have grown, too. They are tall and talkative. They have plans of their own. I can see that our claim to them will expire. They are separate souls; they will belong to nobody but themselves.

  Lately it seems as if this era of life, this intense and messy and sleepless stretch, has run itself out. Neither of my babies is a baby anymore. There are bits of time in the day that weren’t there before, and every month those bits of time are a bit more substantial. I’m less tired. Things seem possible again. The idea of a job in an office or a newsroom no longer sounds like a crazy pipe dream, but something I should perhaps consider.

  Mary fills the school hours with housecleaning and laundry. She calls the electrician and plumber and grocery delivery. She is no longer the sacrosanct guardian of tiny children. Lately I sometimes come upon Mary simply sitting there—a melancholy sight that would have been unimaginable a few years ago—not out of laziness but because there is truly nothing for her to do.

  If we weren’t leaving anyway, we’d look for a way to break up amicably. We should set her free, really, so that she can find a family with babies to take care of. That would be better.

  At least once a day, either Mary or I points out some milestone—the children’s growth, a forthcoming holiday, the change of season. And then Mary says: “So quickly, time is passing.” She says this every single day, and every day she sounds utterly surprised and rueful. Lately our house feels like an ongoing memorial service. But I think that is because Mary is still here. She is a remnant of a life we’ve outgrown.

  I know we’ll never really leave Mary. I know we never exactly left Xiao Li or Pooja, either. We couldn’t, even if we tried. Their influence lives inside our children; they left their mark on our family.

  One day Patrick was fretting about graduating to a new preschool class.

  “I don’t want new teachers,” he bawled. “I want my old teachers!”

  Max turned to him, smooth as stone.

  “I used to feel that way, too,” he said firmly. “But you just have to move on.”

  I caught my breath. I couldn’t believe this advice—ruthless and yet optimistic, slicing to the heart of the problem—was coming from my five-year-old. And then I thought, That’s Mary. Max will never realize where he got this brisk and positive method of tackling the world, but I can recognize its roots.

  I have regrets about Mary that are hard to name. I paid her well. I tried to treat her well. I helped her when I could. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that I bought something from her that should not be for sale. Her life force. Her energy.

  Now that it’s all over, I wonder what we traded and what we took. Mary got money for her children’s school fees and her in-laws’ surgeries. I got some time to work.

  My children were the lucky ones. They made no trade; it was all benefit. They soaked up the love and attention of extra caretakers. They were exposed to languages and cultures and tastes and sounds. They learned new ways of moving through the world, other ways of being alive, personalities alien to their parents’ psychology.

  The children of Mary and Pooja and Xiao L
i had to trade like grown-ups, and their trade was the most brutal of all: they got money, but they grew up without mothers.

  Our family is leaving them behind now, we are leaving all of this. We’ll take the time and the love, which have made us stronger, more successful, more enriched than we were before. We’ll leave the cash we spent, and we won’t miss it.

  Now it seems to me that it was always a transaction of energy—of the finite supply of energy that flows out and cannot be refilled. Physical strength, mental fortitude, emotional endurance. Women have, for generations, drained that energy at home. I wanted to have my kids and save some energy for other work, and so I turned to Mary and the others. I had the chance to buy my energy back from the family at a rate I could afford to pay.

  And it helped. Help does help; that should never be denied. During those first few years, when babies are small and physical needs relentless, help makes such an enormous difference that it is impossible to discuss it coherently. The difference is not subtle; it’s night and day. It is life changing.

  I still get irritated with Mary sometimes; it races over my skin like a fast-spreading rash. Sometimes I think we should fire her. Other times I am flooded with that familiar devotion, and I think we should take her along with us.

  But, if I’m honest, I know we won’t do either. We’ll simply leave, and that will be the end.

  Acknowledgments

  A funny thing about this book about women: It would not exist without the invisible love and work of countless women.

  My brilliant friends from our Delhi writing collective, Sonam Dukpa-Jhalani and Jyoti Pande Lavakare, read early drafts of these chapters with rigorous criticism tempered, somehow, with love and encouragement. My agent, Kathy Robbins, and my editor, Kristine Puopolo, were immediate believers in the idea of this book and worked exhaustively to push it forward. My own mother, who has guided me through both parenthood and writing, generously gave her blessing to write about sensitive family history.