Baby Talk

I have lived in the midwest my entire life. Actually,  I spent my childhood in the same house and have only recently moved out. Having been raised in a decently small town in northern Illinois, I grew up with certain expectations about motherhood. One is to get married in her early to mid 20's and start having children soon after. But while growing up in your teenage years, having a child is taboo. This at least has been what I have observed as being communicated to me. Growing up I did have quite a few friends who got pregnant young. Either they got married at 16, or had an unplanned pregnancy young. During this time I had a lot of preaching from my family. I was told that if I was to get pregnant while living at my parent's house, then the guy better be willing to take care of me because I would not be having a baby as a teenager out of wedlock in their house. It was also a blunt topic of conversation at larger family dinners that you get married first, then have a baby. Anyone who did things out of order would be shamed. I was fine with this, as I had no intention of having a child young. I saw the limitations it put on my friends who did this, and I did not want to be held back by that kind of responsibility so young.

I am now 24 and a senior in college, and I have been dating the same guy for seven and a half years. All but one of my friends from high school have children, most of them are on their 2nd or 3rd already. And now the rhetoric is starting to change. "So when do I get to be a grandmother?" my mom asked me one day while I was home visiting. I was in shock. I have gone for years of being threatened with all the terrible things that will happen to me if I got pregnant, and now I'm being asked when I am planning to do just that? My mom's best friend has a daughter who was in the same year as me in high school, and she is now pregnant. "All my friends are getting grand babies".  This conversation happened last spring when I was 23. That seemed to be the magic number. Now everyone; friends, family, co-workers, are asking "when are you guys getting married?" "when are you going to start your family?". It is just all so strange, it is like a switch was flipped. As a young girl 21 and under, to be a mother was a disgrace, but after that it seems to become an expectation. But my boyfriend does not seem to get the same pressure that I do. Maybe it is because he is not a close with his mother as I am with mine, or that it would be odd if his guy friends and co-workers to ask him about such things. In our reading An Odd Break with the Human Heart the author addresses this social pressure to become a mother, "now that I am in my late twenties everyone wants to extol to me the glory of babies" (Mitchell 55). She talks about how her mother, uncle, even children in her family are asking her about the subject.

Though I do intend to have children someday, I do not feel that I should be having so much pressure to get started now. I have not even finished school yet! I wonder, how do women who do not want children at all feel about this social pressure to become mothers?

Dishwasher

Over the past couple of months my boyfriend and I have been viewing houses to move to. While we were being shown the first house by the would be land lord, we were walking through the newly refinished kitchen. In this house the kitchen was the largest, grandest part of the house. I was happy to see that it had a new dishwasher included, and mentioned it as a plus to my boyfriend, as we do not have a dishwasher in our current place. The landlord chimed in by saying "Hey, now there are two dishwashers in the kitchen". I looked confused, and he nudged my boyfriend with his elbow laughing and looking at me, implying that I was the second dishwasher. We all got the joke and they guys laughed about it a bit. I played along to be pleasant, but did not find it that funny myself. We did not end up choosing that house.

Though I am the one who washes the dishes in our relationship, it is done out of circumstance. I did not like the idea that because I am the female, that "dishwasher" is part of my assumed duties. The joke was referring to the idea that it is part of a woman's role to do the housework like washing the dishes. The reading on Foucault talks a lot about his views on power. In this exchange it seemed to me that the potential land lord was trying to impose his power as a man over me as a woman, and even upon my boyfriend as an elder male over a younger male. Unfortunately my boyfriend saw the humor in the joke and laughed, and I did not protest the statement. In those ways we were allowing the potential land lord to create power in the exchange. But as Foucault was quoted as saying in the chapter "Where there is power, there is resistance" (1998: 95). We resisted any power he could of held over us by deciding not to do business with him.

Sometimes I wonder if women let men exercise power over them in a conversation when the man is in a position of authority or has leverage because the other person is a man, because of their position, or both?

just for kicks,
http://imgur.com/oGSwI