03.27.05
Posted in Domestic/Relationships, Feminism at 10:02 pm by
Latest Sunday Times
Here’s a link to the ST and my latest article. Unfortunately you don’t get to see my photo that they put on the front of the News Review section. It’s quite funny. Almost as if I’m someone important. I thought: how my enemies will puke. By the way, I totally got over that previous depression and cycled to the village for the papers. I suspect I looked a bit cracked but didn’t care.
How to shop your politician
No doubt you saw the pictures of an ecstatic Shane McEntee being carried shoulder-high into Leinster House last week. McEntee beat the odds to win a seat for Fine Gael in the Meath by-election and was full of enthusiasm about his new job.
If you were one of the 75,000 people in Meath who didn’t vote in the election, you probably viewed this enthusiasm somewhat benignly or, if you’ve had no water supply for a few days, with a degree of bitterness. The low turnout caused much analysis of people’s connection with politics. However, I couldn’t help noticing that 75,000 was also the number of people who visited the Dundrum town centre on its recent opening day.
Our duty as consumers far outweighs our duty as citizens and we are willing to undergo many hardships to maintain spending. Indeed the hardships are so onerous, it makes a mystery of surveys that claim shopping is one of our favourite activities.
When we set off on shopping trips, it is certainly with an air of great optimism. The Buddha’s half-smile sneaks upon our faces as we dream of purchases that will make us feel like successful members of society.
Once you hit the tailback into the over-priced multi-storey car park, the delicate threads holding this dream together start to fray. It won’t be long before you find yourself crying in the changing rooms because your pre-menstrual bloated tummy has destroyed the silky lines of a wrap-around dress that would have allowed you to pretend that you were a member of the cast of Sex and the City. Your failure to look attractive in an A-line skirt sparks an identity crisis and soon you’ ll go home, wracked with depression, clutching another white blouse.
The misery created by our lust for shopping is so deep that one wonders why we persist. Surely there must be an upside? There is. Cosseted in the suburban shopping mall of your choice, you are assured of protection from politicians, canvassers, petitioners and other economically inactive citizens. Unlike proper towns, the town centres are private property in which the management get to create a whole new society. In the fake town centre of the 21st century, the customer is not only king, but sole occupant. There will be nobody rattling a tin, waving a leaflet or brandishing a pen, making you feel guilty about the poor, the environment, the deported or the imprisoned.
I had no idea politics was banned until the abortion referendum in 2002, when I was affiliated with the No campaign. Asking for a No meant you were either a screaming liberal or a nutty pro-lifer. I’ll leave you to figure out which one I was.
Full of enthusiasm, I set off one Saturday morning to Liffey Valley. Since our communities congregate in these commercial palaces, where better to conduct a campaign? I picked a spot at a crossroads and silently handed out leaflets explaining the issue.
I was approached by a security man who politely informed me leafleting was not permitted. Even more politely, I explained that my leaflets were not commercial in nature and thus no threat to the paying tenants. In slightly less polite terms, he clarified that the rules did not allow for any leafleting. In even less polite terms, I said my leafleting was in connection with a poll in which all citizens had a right to participate, so he had no business stopping me.
I lost the argument and stormed off towards the exit declaring my intention to continue leafleting in the car park. Mr Security soon arrived with a friend to tell me that since the car park was private property I couldn’t campaign there either. Subsequent enquiries confirmed a similar policy at other well-known shopping centres.
I also discovered that, in California in 1979, a group of high-school students was ejected from a shopping mall when they set up a table petitioning for support for the state of Israel. They took the case to the Supreme Court, which ruled that “the public has the right to engage in free speech and petitioning on private property when that location has the characteristics of a public forum. If the commercial property becomes a place where citizens congregate, the owner’s property rights must yield to the public’s right to engage in expressive activityâ€Â.
Should the Supreme Court make a similar ruling here, it is questionable how this would be greeted by the shopping public. Perhaps you might like to bump into Shane McEntee on a Saturday afternoon so you can ask him to pursue the issue of rat-infestation at your children’s school? More likely, having failed to soothe yourself through the self-gratification of shopping, and instead convinced yourself that you are unattractive and downtrodden, you will be grateful to be spared the do-gooders and politicians.
Can it be that the most effective method of destroying western democracy is not through the deployment of the suicide bomber, but simply the construction of more shopping centres?
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Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 1:04 pm by
I was really going to go to Mass this morning. Even tho’ the clocks went forward and I lost an hour. I had the usual tea and toast in bed, showered, did some yoga, dressed up the baby since he would accompany me whilst the toddler stayed home. Then I tried to get dressed and things went downhill. My post-pregnancy black trousers wouldn’t close. I put a long top over them anyway and a nice coat and was going to persevere but as I approached the door I was consumed by self-pity. How could any decent person leave the house with a zip precariously slipping down because the button won’t hold the trousers together? It’s been 8 weeks and the rest of me is fine but the tummy is still a disaster area. I know I can’t consider dieting because I’m breastfeeding and I need the calories; I know I’ll have more time and energy to exercise in the coming months as my hours of sleep lengthen, as will the hours of brightness in the evening. But there is nothing worse than looking down at a portruding belly and a wardrobe full of unwearable clothes and wondering if life is going to be one long tracksuit. I made my tearful way back up stairs and into the bed. My husband as usual had the role of persuading me out of my despair but I needed a good 20 minutes of wallowing in the misery of being fat and grieving for my once hourglass figure.
Fortunately, as always, these depressions are shortlived and I rose again, tracksuited and am off for a walk. One day.
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03.24.05
Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 7:01 pm by
I watched that David McWilliams programme in which I starred. One of the other panellists makes a little speech about her decision to work outside the home. Her argument is peppered with at least 5 separate comments about how she could not ’sit at home’ and mind children. She admires women who ’sit at home’. She would be bored ’sitting at home’. The camera flicks to me smiling benignly at her. I am actually thinking, sit???? What sitting?? The only time I sit is when I am feeding the baby. After that I run. Constantly. What do you know??
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Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 6:58 pm by
There’s no match for cleaning, guys
An Ireland rugby fixture leads Sarah Carey to reflect on men’s loose grasp of housework
“Are you watching the match?” the cheery butcher inquires, clearly expecting a positive response.
Momentarily I’m confused. I had been trying to figure out a menu that didn’t require using a hob all week, since yet again a tradesman has let me down. Casting aside thoughts of lamb and pork chops, I do a mental checklist. It’s Saturday so it can’t be Champions League. It’s only March so GAA hasn’t excited the population. A crucial Premiership or FA Cup tie? A European or World Cup qualifier? I have a brainwave. “Oh the rugby! We’re playing France!”, delighted with myself for remembering. The delight is short-lived as I realise the implications of yet another Six Nations weekend. That’s three matches that have to be watched, three second-hand commentaries to bore me, and nine hours when my husband’s attention will be on George Hook instead of setting up the composting bin.
My eyes betray dismay. The jovial meat man declares to another customer, a weathered-looking farmer, “Ah sure, the women aren’t interested, are they?” I resist the temptation to spit out what I’m thinking: “the women” don’t have time to be interested.
If it were a case of “the match”, it wouldn’t be so bad. But thanks to the marketing achievements of Sky, there’s an important match several nights of the week. And even if it’s not today’s big match, there will be some other “must” on the sporting calendar to distract the boyfriends, husbands and fathers from their domestic obligations. We go from Six Nations straight into Cheltenham, and there was simply no escape last week from the compulsory celebratory air around this formerly three-, now four-day event. That’s four days of running to the bookies instead of running the child’s bath, and four days of “just checking the results on Aertel” instead of checking that the meat isn’t burning while I’m upstairs with the Jif, sorry, Cif.
I grow increasingly agitated by the mandatory passive-participation in sport now required of the middle-class, middle-aged man. Somewhere and somehow, around 1996 I think, watching “the match” got written into the domestic contract as a non-negotiable item for men. Sport has a noble air that excuses it from the weekend flurry of catching up on housework. Once this nobility was attached to actually playing sport, and not hanging out in the pub watching it and then staying in the pub discussing it while women are racing through the ironing. Just when we were assured that men were sharing the burden of home maintenance, watching sport became the latest weapon in their arsenal to avoid housework.
That stockpile had included some admirable passive-aggressive techniques. Man-wishing-to-avoid-household-task could start off with postponing the job so long that the woman just ended up doing it herself. This seemed easier than nagging. If you keep up the nagging then you realise you’ve become a nag and are turning into your mother, so you just go ahead and do it. Of course, then you’ve become a martyr, in which case you’ve also turned into your mother.
If postponement becomes unavoidable, men proceed to doing the job so badly, you have to do it again anyway.
And now we have the use of sport and its double effect on the non-performance of housework. Since “the match” is on telly, this prevents men doing chores. In addition, they would much rather you refrained from doing it in their presence. Vacuuming is a particular source of irritation during the match.
At this point they can employ two strategies. They could just complain. But the smarter route is to urge you to relax and sit down. How can one relax knowing that the organic fruits have to be stewed for the infant’s weaning programme? You could not stew the fruit and give the child a jar instead, but this would make you a bad mother and faced with the choice of being a bad wife or a bad mother, the latter is the one to avoid.
Alternatively, you could just leave the house and engage in an alleged recreational activity, such as having hot wax poured over sensitive areas of your body and superfluous hair mercilessly stripped from your skin. On your return you find that no progress has been made on the work but there is an expectation of gratitude as he’s been minding the children. Fortunately this never involved leaving the TV room, and so you are left with only one course of action. Encourage him to watch the match in the pub so you can get on with it in peace.
He heads guilt-free to the pub and pretend that the work never happens at all. This act of delusion is revealed when the housework row takes place every few months and men can claim they do half because they don’t know that 90% of it exists.
You’ve conspired in helping them believe this. Now, not only are you doing most of the work, you are not entitled to any acknowledgement, never mind gratitude, for doing it at all. In our so-called post-feminist world, housework is not simply without status, but fast becoming a guilty secret.
The glass ceiling appears like a minor skirmish compared to the fight for shared cleaning, on which we have lost rather than gained territory. Any hope of a comeback seems dim as long as Sky Sports’ army of professional sportsmen dominate men’s spare time.
As for women’s spare time, it has yet to come into existence.
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Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 6:53 pm by
Herr Minister has had a change of heart and is paying for the Nigerian Leaving Cert student to be flown back to Ireland following the protest by his classmates after the deportation. I’ve just seen Michael on the news and he’s all bashful and apologetic and even smiled. It’s quite extraordinary. Maybe he is a big teddy bear after all. Or maybe he discovered that the gardai had told him a heap of lies, which McDowell repeated in the Dail (in ignorance) regarding the student’s access to lawyers. In any event, it is good news. Am particularly pleased at the politicisation of the students of Palmerston school.
Irish people have a funny kind of racism. In general they will complain bitterly about Nigerians coming over and scamming our social welfare system. However many communities have raised protests over the deportation of specific individuals that they know personally. Unfortunately most of those campaigns are unsuccessful.
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03.21.05
Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 11:34 am by
Tomorrow (Tuesday) I’ll be on the telly. RTE1, 2.30pm on David McWilliams’ programme “The Big Bite”. The subject for discussion is “What women want” and we recorded it last week. The conversation flew all over the place and everything from childbearing to politics to careers to relationships got a mention. At the end of the programme David seemed frustrated because we hadn’t been able to crystalise a simple answer to his question.
So I lay awake in bed last night, whilst the men of the household slept soundly, pondering the issue. My focus was concentrated by publication of an article of mine yesterday in the Sunday Times (!) on a frequent theme – How men get out of housework. Beside my article was another persuading women that they could manage a career and family. India Knight’s article was about female teenage aggression. The paper seemed full of women questioning our nature and purpose. When I copped this I panicked for a second that I had been drawn into some Murdoch inspired campaign which would only serve to undermine women. The last thing I want to be is an unwitting pawn in the Backlash.
However, it is clear that most women are not happy. My previous post on the ‘lesser knife’ seemed to hit a chord and some have been sharing their experiences with me since. One correspondent said that her abiding memory of staying home with the babies would be standing at the sink, chopping carrots, crying. She would never regret staying home minding the babies and putting her career on hold; so why was she unhappy?
I wouldn’t consider abandoning the babies yet and while not unhappy there is an underlying sense of frustration and need to justify my life. I briefly considered Plato’s theory of inconsistent motivations, discussed in a previous post in connection with The Sopranos (see the book Philosophy and The Sopranos for more). Tony and Carmella will never be happy since their desire to live like a normal family is incosistent with their desire to live off their mafia earnings (and in Tony’s case to sleep with lots of other women). Perhaps most women simply have inconsistent motivations. They want the family, to spend lots of time with their babies, but they also want the money and excitement that goes with a career. Since never the twain shall meet, they will always be miserable. They’re also under huge pressure to have the perfect house and body but since that takes time and money, both of which are generally in short supply, that adds to the dissatisfaction.
However I dimissed this, because although relevant I still don’t think it’s at the heart of our self-doubt. I think what most women want is simply approval. From everyone. Husbands, parents, children, bosses. And few get it. To begin with, if you’re in need of external validation (as I am), the last place you’ll find it is at home and certainly not in your role as mother. No one EVER says*, “you’re a great mother”. Instead you are fed a constant stream of advice or asked questions, the answers to which will only confirm that you fall far short of accepted norms. “Does he sleep through?” Of course not, he’s 7 weeks old. “Does he eat for you?” Well most of the time but he’s a toddler; the food will be ignored at least two or three times a week. After that, there is a better babygro, a better bottle, a better way to mash the banana (I kid you not), a better way to feed him, a better way to sit him up, lie him down, wind him , stop him crying, get him to sleep. IT NEVER STOPS. This is even before the bottle/breast war. So if you’re at home, you feel you should be at work and acting like a real person, because staying at home has no value to the rest of the world. If you’re at work you probably feel you should be at home.
That’s why women cry in the changing rooms of clothes shops and when the dinner doesn’t taste nice. WE CAN’T DO ANYTHING RIGHT. It’s terrible really.
Men don’t appear to have this problem. Where we worry all time they are far more relaxed. I used to know a particular guy who was quite good looking and always had a terribly serious expresion, which was most endearing. He confessed to a mutual friend that this caused women to enquire tenderly, on a frequent basis, as to what he was thinking about. He always had to make up an answer because the truth was that he wasn’t thinking about anything. I would love to think about nothing for a while. How relaxing.
*There is one notable exception to this. I recently met Liz McManus the Labour TD. She asked what I was doing i.e. what was I working at. I admitted I was ‘just at home’ in an apologetic fashion. We chatted on and at the close of our conversation as she walked away, she turned around and told me I was doing a ‘great thing’. I nearly wept on the spot.
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03.20.05
Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 9:30 pm by
Despite my attempts to be a cool earth mother relaxed type, the routine-police made their mark and I ended up reading Secrets of the Baby Whisperer, The Baby Whisperer for Toddlers and the tantalizingly titled The Baby Whisperer Solves all your Problems. The Baby Whisperer by the way was Tracey Hogg who died in November from skin cancer. She was only in her forties. Anyway, she’s a relaxed Gina Ford. Gina Ford for the unititiated is author of The Contented Baby. She’s big on the clock. Or so I am told by Contented readers. In new mommy world there are the Whisperers and the Contenteds. Both books are read by professional types like myself who in true post-modern style shun our mothers’ advice and consult experts on how to rear our children.
Having overdosed on these manuals I ended up obsessed by timings, routines, second guessing every move, forming strategies to eliminate night feeds, cursed with unrealistic expectations and generally applying management techniques to the baby and wondering why they weren’t working. Fortunately before things got completely out of hand, my eyes were opened and I realised that a) my baby is really good and nice and never cries so why was I inventing problems that needed to be solved by the book just so my life could be a bit easier and b) my life would be a lot easier if I just fed the child when he wanted instead of when I wanted.
And guess what, now that I don’t spend my entire day (and night) planning and thinking and strategising…things are easier. I think reaching this point is always difficult for us modern women who have worked in offices where research is done, best practice is applied and results achieved. Little babies are not machines but we seem to spend more time managing them than enjoying them. It’s almost like we expect them to be Borg and if they don’t conform it’s a big problem. All the fault of the capitalist system of course. Altho, I’m sure I would like 6 hours straight sleep at some point in the future. Maybe in a month or two.
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03.16.05
Posted in Feminism at 10:28 pm by
Gardai have released their latest detainee. It sounds like it was one of the alibis but not sure. To be honest, not sure if this latest activity is actually a sign of progress. Unless the letter in the coffin was a confession I can’t see what new evidence there might be. I wish this were not so.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day. My dad is doing the commentary for our local parade. Again.
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03.09.05
Posted in Domestic/Relationships, Feminism at 9:40 pm by
My father is a County Councillor and currently Chairman of the General Council of County Councillors, the national organisation for councillors. You can check him out and his colleagues here. As you can see, most councillors, like him are middle aged to elderly rural men who busy themselves with local politics, struggling for services which seem petty in the international scheme of things but which are the cause of huge rows and upsets throughout the country. They also busy themselves attending meetings and very important conferences, such as those organised by the General Council of County Councillors. The conferences are a central part of the councillors’ lives. Here they learn all about the details of the infrastructure (water, sewerage, transport etc) that they work to provide and of course, they also get to collect lucrative travelling expenses.
Anyway, at a recent event, the organiser was heard to recount a bitter tale of trying to keep councillors at these conferences happy. He warned those present never to bother trying to do things too fancy for these guys because it would not be appreciated. Councillors like things a certain way, and to mess with their fine tastes would earn their wrath. At one event, he ordered the hotel to serve a buffet of Chicken a la King with rice as the evening meal on the first day of the conference since he knew from experience that many would arrive in late and it would be difficult to serve a more formal meal. He was however berated for serving up such muck to men more used to meat,spuds and two veg. A particular councillor listed many complaints regarding his organisation of the event but finished with the line, “and remember, councillors don’t eat rice!”
As the story was recounted to my father, to the peals of laughter from us multi-cultural cuisine eating sophisticates, he nodded his head gravely and added, “He’s right. I was raging when I saw the menu.”
So in case you wondered: councillors don’t eat rice.
What a title for a book.
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03.08.05
Posted in Irish Politics at 9:25 pm by
Deprived of cable, I am fortunate to receive BBC Radio 4 on long wave, and pretty good reception too. Each morning I manage to listen to a few minutes of Yesterday in Parliament and am monitoring Clark’s attempts to get his fascist Anti-Terrorism Act through the Houses. I take a keener interest in this than is usual as Clark’s policies are slightly close to home.
Prior to 2002, the status of black sheep of our family was held by the ex-priest, convicted of embezzling from a health board (his defence was that the money was for Aids Victims without proper paperwork). He bought a pub, gambled the profits, got bailed out by his brother-in-law, gambled more profits, got the bar lady pregnant, married her, gambled her inheritance and last we heard had fled to England with another woman. The rest of us are angels as almost all known vices appeared to be channelled towards this one individual and the rest of us were spared.
However, the alleged crimes of my second cousin, David Bermingham, make for more international headlines than those grubby acts. David is one of the NatWest lawyers accused by Texan prosecutors of conspiring with Enron executives to defraud NatWest of several million pounds (Stg). The US is seeking his extradition from England. As David points out, they want him extradited for an alleged crime, committed in England against an English bank. To do so, the US, under Blunket’s post 911 anti-terrorism legislation, need not provide any shred of evidence that a crime was committed: they just ask the Home Secretary to send over anyone they want on the basis of ‘information’. And as foreigners can be held indefinitely without bail in prison in the US, he and this two co-accused could languish in a Texan jail for years before getting a court date. Of course, when Blunket’s bill was going thro’ everyone just assumed that the only people to be extradited would be nasty Asian types who we would ‘know’ were mixed up in terrorism even if a government, committed to protecting its citizens, didn’t have the pesky evidence to prove anything. No one considered that white, middle class, Oxbridge educated, Sandhurst trained officer-lawyers would end up pleading for their liberty.
Anyway, its all in the hands now of Clark, and who knows what he’ll do. This update a fornight ago from the Daily Telegraph.
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