The Last Revelation

"I don't know how you do it!"

That's what they say. And, you know what, they're right. No one really knows how I run my house, my household, my family. It is a mystery. A world apart; a world alone. There was something to be said for the cloister. At least there were folks in there with you... but this. While I for one, thankfully, have useful peers to rely upon they are much too often outnumbered and outweighed by others. Outflanked by noisy intervenors, so out of line.

I am writing to you today from a pretty high hill of fedupedness. I am still in my professional tailspin, one coloured by an emergent desire to live as fully each day with my children instead. But what future is stay-at-homing? I am loathe to run it down but then again, I will...

I don't know how bad I'll feel about saying this but I'll still say it. I feel at times a reluctance to look after my own children -- devoid of the alternate identity of a job -- because of the indentured servitude to the family engendered by too many men. Please not another directive from some asinine patrimony, not today. Not to me. Come on, you do not have a clue. I am running this show.

I am running this show yet... every second corner seems to drop me into another pit of blood-sucking misplaced prattle from some person with a penis. Sure I have overcome the many opinions of the faux-er sex on all manner of things birth and breastfeeding. Now I have to traverse a minefield of papa-doc-medicalized self help parenting books. Look out for the bombardment of the Paul Kersey hold your ground parenting standards from my parenting associate, p-man. Or how about an incoming hand grenade in the form of florid commentary on child care provided by an employed male out to explain to me that a nanny will, and I quote, "raise my children" for me. Yes, my son, child rearing is a solitary and one-dimensional undertaking, the assignment of a person, the outcome of a myopic system of tasks and drudgery.

I hear you. Sure buddy. There is, and never was, a village? Forget my grandmother and her life of haphazard industry in a community built of families. Forget her days trading off with sisters and mothers, neighbours and friends, all manners of hangers-on. Forget my aunt who was paid for child care while staying at home in 1971. Sanctify my mother and her carless suburban prison. A motherhood she hated and you revere. A family life that built for us this era and its consumer-industrial child-life needs of Safety First and Fisher-PriceClub and Baby Whine-en-stein.

Today, I feel like effing Laura Croft in the Last Revelation. Where is my flamethrower? Gotta blast my way out of here. It is the only escape from these uncalled-for advisors. I would like to want, and like, the prospect of even entertaining the idea of another year as primary care giver but if these are the conditions... I can't do it.

Sorry Dads. Sorry Men. I will confess. You were from the beginning my attraction to the exchange of family thought all over the web. From you I grew this evening's right to rant. So to the many of you who type up a steady refutation of all this -- Mums and Dads, there is an irony that it is in this sphere I choose to get this off my chest. But two things. 1.) Let's face it, there is little my husband enjoys more than when we communicate with each other through the blog. 2.) If this isn't what a blog is for then why bother?

As you were.