Work at home

Work at home. There used to be a particularly interesting slogan that said a variation of "behind every successful man there is a woman." In an anomalous way it simultaneously denigrated both the genders, or elevated both. There seems to be a certain presumption of the metric of success. The woman has no success other than the success of the man which the woman is motivating. This saying takes on a different meaning in a World where the rush to remote work has become a pandemic by itself. The pandemic provoked a certain kind of work where the place of work and the place of leisure conflated on the dining table during the numerous lockdowns across the World. The notion of work from home (WFH) became commonplace. But it also exposed a form of work whose history far predates the romance with WFH. That work is the nameless work at home (WAH) which is only acknowledged, obliquely, in the saying about the woman motivating the success of the man. But for generations people have done WAH, I have seen my mother do it - an educated woman - with aspirations of her own - cut short by the demands of WAH and the collective anxiety that her not doing WAH will create a freak out of me. I still turned out to be a little off, but that was no fault to the WAH but more attributable to a liking of death metal music (I mean genius like Black Sabbath), Ayn Rand, and MAD magazine. But there was no acknowledgement of the WAH of my mother or the countless mothers across the World. And now we have WFH compounded with WAH. The pandemic exposed fault lines that were hidden under the top soil. It was always there, I have bondhus who are super human in their effort to balance WAH and work. They face pressures that would be considered equivalent of being thrown under a bus and told to get up run. With a ball and chain tied to their feet. What amazes me is how well they run. How carefully they run across a minefield of pressures where the work gets undervalued because it interferes with the WAH. And it is not a gendered argument. Anyone who seems to have been assigned the WAH has to struggle to do the other work, be it WFH or work that requires real life presence. In the heat of the summer to run around and make sure dreams come true while the WAH draws down the last breath at the end of the day. Because some truly believe that they are not expected to WAH. The imaginary lines are drawn in families where the roles are arbritrarily assigned and some one must WAH and do nothing else and the other never has to WAH. Many people wiser than me have written about this. But when these realities, and the accompanying hardships stare me in the face, I wonder why we subscribe to these lines. And the answer is read out to me very clearly. The ones who WAH bring up the child. As if it is not a shared responsibility between the two people who brought the child to the World. I wonder, being a parent, what the heck were you thinking when you chose to have a kid (unless you were a complete moron and the child was an accident) - I will have the child but the other will do everything thereafter? It is the mentality that says that I am more important, more profitable, and thus not expected to do the WAH. Because the WAH usually earns no money. So it comes down to money, isn't it? To keep the revenue differential between one who does WAH and one who does not, WAH must be uncompensated other than, "Honey, here is a credit card you can use." This World order begins to break down when a super hero comes along and says, I will do the WAH, and tell you what, I will also work. That is a moment of pride for the onlooker and a moment of anxiety for some. A loss of control. And the consequent resistance. I see this over and over again. I have seen a person shot to death because the person refused to be stuck to WAH and dared to venture out. I told this person, "I will not let anyone harm you." And my false promise welled up in tears when I touched her face in the crematorium, a face that had to be rebuilt because of the damage from the special kind of bullet that was used to shoot her to death, defaced her and her dare. I just wish this would end and those who have chosen to hitch their lives together through the arcane institution of marriage would see that every kind of work matters, and every kind of work is shared, and if not shared, genuinely appreciated. No, this is not about women and International Women's Day. But this is about work. As the Beatles said, "Its been a hard days night." Respect my work and let me do it well.