12:00 P.M.
SO, AWAY FROM MY BUM, AND TO THE OUTER WORLD: THE RUNNING of the household.
My brother Andrew lives with us now, for when life gives you Technically Homeless Sibling, you make Put a Sibling in the Attic-ade!
It matters not that I am a middle-aged woman steeped in nineteenth-century literature, with two children and two jobs; whilst he is an eighteen-year-old Star Trek fan studying for his A-levels. A sixteen-year age gap, and its ensuing cultural disparity, are but a mere bagatelle—for do not many of my male heroes regularly marry women much younger? So it must be, like, fun. Having a teenager in the house will be a unique opportunity to learn about a different, younger generation. I will gain a whole new set of reference points and skills. The cultural clash will be enlivening. It’s like the beginning of a long-running sitcom. Teenage Boy About the House. Very Different Strokes.
The youngest of my seven siblings, Andrew is six feet four, with a shoulder-length bouffant mane of hair, and usually clad in a floor-length black leather coat—which I frequently have to steal while he’s asleep, and Febreze all over, because floor-length black leather coats are very badly ventilated. The first thing I learned when Andrew moved in is that everyone in The Matrix would have ponged super bad.
WE MOVE HIM into the loft with his four bin bags of possessions—two of clothes, two of books—and he seems delighted.
“My own bathroom!” he exclaims. “Now I won’t have to flush all the time!”
I gently explain to him how much plumbers cost in London, and how flushing is mandatory in the twenty-first century.
“You are financially responsible for all your own blockages,” I conclude. “Your shit is on you. Possibly literally, if the toilet overflows.”
This is an important lesson for any young adult to learn.
He Blu-Tacks his Lord of the Rings posters on the wall and stacks up his math and physics textbooks by the bed. His dumbbells are next to them. My loft office is gone. It is now a teenage boy’s room.
“Pity about the old running machine,” he says, sadly.
We declined to bring his secondhand running machine with him, as none of us could even get it out of my mom’s house—let alone carry it up the four flights of stairs to our loft. It weighs approximately the same as a whale.
I’ll have a gentle stroll on it, whilst watching Antiques Roadshow, my mother had said, eyeing it warily.
The next time I visited her, it had gone the way of all running machines—it was rammed up in the corner, draped with damp washing.
Our lives together are enlightening. He shows me how to slaughter Thrall’s Horde of Undead Forsaken in World of Warcraft, and I show him the Toilet Duck bottle. He explains the Kanye West “fish dicks” joke on South Park, and I explain to him the problematic nature of intersectional racism and homophobia. In the evenings, the whole family gathers to play Mario Kart, and once we’ve explained to him that he can’t shout “Motherfucker!” in front of the children whenever they run him off the road, it all goes swimmingly. I greatly improve my performance. Sometimes, I come seventh out of eight contenders.
The main thing I learn, however, is how different we are. Bewilderingly different.
TODAY, I’M IN the kitchen, trying to work. I’m very tired. Lizzie is ill, with a cough, and so, last night, as is often the case these days, I worked until midnight to hit all my deadlines. Today, having a cogent thought is like trying to push a marshmallow through a keyhole. My brain is floppy and peevish with exhaustion.
Andrew, however, is chatty.
He’s standing by the oven, repeatedly dropping a tennis ball on the floor.
“Did that look like that was just falling straight to the floor to you?” he asks, excitedly.
“Yeah?” I say, staring at my laptop.
“Well, you’re wrong. When it fell from my hand, its speed was actually zero. But as it fell to the floor, it accelerated. Acceleration due to gravity. Watch!”
I press save on the document. Andrew drops the ball again. I observe, patiently.
“I’ve got to say, it definitely looked like it was moving when it left your hand, dude.”
“That’s because it’s only falling a short way. If I could drop it a mile from Earth, you’d notice the difference. Maybe I should drop it out of the bathroom window?”
He looks eager.
Andrew is preternaturally gifted at physics. All day, he sits at the table doing math equations using symbols I don’t understand. Every so often, he tries to explain the symbols to me. He has tried, on many occasions, to teach me the basics of algebra. As I’m someone who didn’t even learn their times tables, he might as well be explaining Mozart to the cat. I’m a words person.
“It’s like another language,” he says, helpfully—drawing things on the whiteboard as we try to eat dinner. “Once you crack the codes, you see the entire universe differently.”
I can’t crack the codes. I can’t see things how he does.
MOVING IN WITH a family must be hard for him—for here, in my house, day-to-day, I am not the person he used to know.
When he was just a visitor—coming for Christmas on holiday—I was someone else. Off-duty me, having fun times, putting a keg of cider on the table and kicking back with chilled anecdotes.
“Do the dishwasher in the morning—we’re on holiday!”
“Who has an anecdote about a cyst bursting? Me! I’ll go first!”
When I made my offer for him to come here, he must have thought he was basically coming to live in the party scene from Animal House—albeit one with much nicer soft furnishings, and two small children incongruously hanging around in the background.
Now he lives here, and the holiday/party John Belushi-sister has disappeared. Day-to-day, I am no fun at all.
Instead, there is this slightly uptight woman who spends all day staring at her laptop and sighing like she’s losing the will to live—and, yet, she doesn’t seem to appreciate attempts to cheer her up with the intriguing conundrums of physics or algebra. If you try and suggest maybe she should take a break—“Go for a walk, or play Mario Kart for a bit. You deserve it!”—because she clearly needs one, she puts on a very pained air and says, “I won’t be able to just ‘go for a walk’ for at least five years, Andrew. I’m working my way through an ever-lengthening to-do list,” and then goes back to staring at the laptop, visibly pissed off.
Or, if she’s not at the laptop, sighing, she’s walking into the room with her lips pressed really tightly together, like she’s trying not to shout, and says, “Well, today is end-to-end bullshit,” and talks about how busy she is—but then does something weird, like paint oil onto all the kitchen worktops, or go and repeatedly stab the lawn with a garden fork, shouting about “drainage.”
In the evenings—sitting in the perfectly nice front room—she’ll suddenly leap up, and go, “WHO put the big overhead light on?,” angrily click it off, and then spend four minutes going around turning on half a dozen tiny lamps, instead, muttering about “flattering sidelighting enhancing the mood.” If she’s so busy, why would she do that? It makes no sense.
Likewise, when she gets mad about the Stairs System. She’s obsessed with the Stairs System. It’s fucking crazy.
Every so often, there will be a bellow of outrage from the hallway—and then she’ll come into the kitchen and say, in a way that’s supposed to be humorous, but is clearly motivated by fury, “Why can no one get their head around the Stairs System? It’s perfectly simple. If there’s something at the bottom of the stairs—shoes, new loo roll, books—and you’re going up the stairs, take them with you! Likewise, if there’s something at the top of the stairs, and you’re going down—take them with you! It couldn’t be any more basic! It’s like a funicular railway of stuff! Stuff goes up—stuff goes down! UP! DOWN! DOWN! UP! Why does no one but me get this?????”
And you, and your two little nieces, and your brother-in-law, will stare at her, and wonder why she’s so uptight all the time.
Why is she worried about so many things? Why doesn’t she just concentrate on work, and then chill? She just seems to . . . see things differently.
I SEE THINGS DIFFERENTLY.
IN LATER years—whilst still galloping up the stairs, my arms full of shoes, loo roll, and books—I have a sudden revelation about why my rants about the Stairs System meet with blank eyes from men; whereas, all the women I know yelp, “Yes! Yes! I do this too! The Stairs System! Why do men not get it???”
It’s because we have been brought up in two utterly different worlds.
Living with my little brother allows me to see this—for, unlike previous boyfriends or my husband, I know what his life has been like. We were brought up in the same house, on the same income, in the same town. Really, if anyone were to see the world the same as me, it would be this man, whose DNA and upbringing I share. We come from the same world.
But we do not—even though we shared the same parents, and toilet. From birth, men and women are installed with different software. We are given different information. Our worldviews have totally different frameworks.
If you compare the pile of books and magazines by our beds, you see how this happens. When Andrew was thirteen, the floor by his bed was heaped with gaming magazines, and books about physics. He liked physics, his Xbox, and he read books and magazines solely about how to be good at physics—and about how to play Xbox.
He had no choice in this—there are no “general interest” magazines for teenage boys. A boy in a newsagent is faced with specialist titles—on music, gaming, fishing, film, martial arts, etc.—and so gains a worldview dictated by mono-interest, clannish communities, dedicated to becoming good at “a thing.” In newsagents, this is made clear by simple categorization: “men’s magazines” are racked together under the title “Men’s Interests.” Men have interests. You pick your thing; you dedicate yourself to it. You see the whole world through your specialist subject. You concentrate on becoming good at your thing—and that is how you become successful. This is the way of men.
By way of contrast, the newsagents’ racks for female periodicals are titled “Women’s Lifestyle.” Men have interests—women have lives. Lives they must strive to perfect. As a consequence, the magazines heaped by my bed were there to guide me through a world where it was presumed I would have to become knowledgeable about a whole range of things that would give me not an interest, but a life. And a stylish life, at that. And that is how you become successful if you are a woman. By curating a whole life. By identifying problems in your house, wardrobe, body, job, relationships, and existence, and learning how to solve them.
Like most teenage girls, I was being given kind but firm information on a panoply of skills, which it was absolutely presumed I needed to master in order to succeed in the world—some lighthearted, some serious.
Here are the things I remember reading about, and regarding as deathly vital, in magazines bought from jumble sales like Cosmo, Woman’s Own, the Lady, Elle, Sugar, and Jackie; at the same age, Andrew was almost solely dedicated to learning to get to Level 47.
At no point would Andrew have ever read anything about any of these subjects. And so, he has grown up in a world where he simply doesn’t see these things.
In some ways, it’s been a massive benefit to him—he, unlike several female friends of mine, has never decided not to date someone perfectly nice, just because they’re a Libra. And his ability to dedicate himself solely to the things that he’s good at, and which interest him, have meant he’s really good at physics and Xbox. He’s been accepted to study for a degree at UCL, and on World of Warcraft, he has a winged, armored horse, which is apparently a really big deal.
But the problems begin when men and women—raised in these different ways—start to interact with one another. We live in totally different worlds, with totally different aims and frameworks. The rules and objectives are at mad variance. We just don’t have a fucking clue what the other guys are on about.
Yesterday, for instance, Andrew—a man—came home with a single, new cereal bowl that he found in a charity shop, and did not understand why I—a woman—was furious that he’d broken the Crockery Rules I had to learn when I was fifteen, reading The Lady.
“THAT BOWL—IT’S BREAKING UP MY CROCKERY SCHEME, ANDREW,” I say, with a tight smile, as he holds it aloft in awe. “IT DOESN’T MATCH ANYTHING I HAVE. BUT NEITHER IS IT A DELIGHTFUL PIECE OF VINTAGE THAT I CAN BUILD A NEW COLLECTION AROUND. IT’S JUST A FUCKING WHITE BOWL, ANDREW. WHY IS IT HERE?”
“But . . . it’s just the right size for my Shreddies,” he says, confused. “And it was only one pound. I like it.”
“BUT WHERE’S IT GOING TO GO, ANDREW?” I say, opening the crockery drawer, and dramatically pointing inside. “WHERE’S IT GOING TO GO? IT’S TOO BIG FOR THE ‘SMALL BOWLS’ PILE, AND TOO SMALL FOR THE ‘BIG BOWLS’ PILE. WE’RE GOING TO HAVE TO START A NEW PILE, ANDREW. A NEW PILE. FOR THE ONE ROGUE WHITE BOWL ON ITS OWN. THEY DON’T HAVE DRAWERS WITH ONE ROGUE WHITE BOWL IN THEM ON PINTEREST, ANDREW. I URGE YOU TO LOOK. THERE IS NO SOCIETAL TEMPLATE FOR THIS.”
“I could . . . keep it in my room?” he says, looking both confused and frightened.
“I THINK THAT WOULD BE FOR THE BEST, ANDREW. YES. KEEP THE ROGUE BOWL IN YOUR ROOM.”
Of course, for “single white rogue bowl,” you can substitute “horrible La-Z-Boy armchair,” or “disgusting pair of sneakers,” or “horrible coffee table that matches nothing,” or “mad choice of last-minute skydiving holiday.” “Wrong” things that men will pick, which will infuriate the women in their lives—because the women have been reading expert advice on armchairs, sneakers, coffee tables, and holidays since they became sentient.
Women do not make sudden, snap decisions about things. We have been taught to believe there is a best practice for everything that needs to be done—that there are rules—and that adhering to this best practice prevents problems further down the line. We will have worked out our “armchair personality type,” constructed a Pinterest board of our favorite kinds of armchairs, got advice on armchairs from Mumsnet, and planned to buy the perfect armchair in two years’ time—after we’ve redecorated the front room. We will have found out the (a) safest, (b) easiest to clean, and (c) most versatile type of armchair, and be slowly working toward it, on a long-term plan.
Whereas men just see a thing—on sale, or possibly in a dumpster—think, I like that. It will do, and it would never occur to them that their girlfriend/wife/sister has been thinking about armchairs since she was thirteen, and has a long-term armchair plan, which he has now just utterly set fire to, with his spontaneous shit chair. For who thinks like that?
WOMEN. WOMEN THINK LIKE THAT.
If you are a man reading this, and you want to test if this is true or not, go up to any woman—any woman—and ask her if she has, say, a particular “aesthetic” about cushions. Or what her “beliefs” are about coat hangers—no wire hangers. NO WIRE HANGERS!!! Or which school of thought she comes from re. towels. White, colored, patterned, tasseled—or, Monica from Friends-style, a complex categorization system that matches a particular towel to a particular guest, room, and/or task?
Never try to do something spontaneously “for the house”—women have been planning that shit since before you were born. They are working toward a to-do list they started in their teens. A to-do list that will lead to a perfect life.
I tried to explain this to another brother, Eddie, when he came round to my place, six months into his first relationship.
“Women are always doing mad things—like hoovering curtains, or . . . moisturizing their elbows,” he said, bemused and also slightly alarmed, sipping on a beer. “It’s just weird.”
As he said it, I could see why these things seemed random. Men have never been taught to look at a curtain, or an elbow, and think of it as a problem. They don’t live in a world of five-page to-do lists.
That is their power.
That is also, sometimes, their downfall. Because life is long, and it involves . . . other people.
I AM, IF I’m honest, constantly, quietly furious with Andrew—for being Andrew.
When he moved in, I had a wonderful vision of how life with him would pan out. His advent would mean the addition of a third, magical, part-time parent—quietly seeing what needed doing, in the day-to-day running of the house, and lifting some metaphorical weight, when he’d finished cranking his actual thirty-kilogram dumbbells.
That there would be days I’d come downstairs, exhausted from a night of tending ill children, and find he’d magically tidied the kitchen and laid the table.
The evenings where I’d finish work and find him taking some oven chips and Quorn nuggets out of the oven, saying, Welcome to Andrew’s Café!
The weekends he’d come into the front room—where I was hunched over a pile of paperwork while the kids were hitting each other with cushions—and say, “What say old Uncle Andrew takes the young uns to the zoo! Kids—fancy getting some hot penguin action?,” and I would weep with fond gratitude as he ushered them out of the house for a few hours.
I’d even imagined him coming home with a bunch of flowers, one evening—going, Daffodils! How jolly! And only a pound! Who knew you could buy such radiant beauty for a single coin of the realm!
I have imagined such a brilliant Andrew. I have imagined a brilliant, female Andrew.
I have imagined, basically, me at his age. In my teenage years, I was basically a third parent to my seven younger siblings. I roasted my first chicken when I was ten; I mowed the lawn every week (except for the sad month after I accidentally mowed a frog’s leg off. Did you know frogs scream when they have a leg mowed off? They absolutely wail. I was like Clarice with the lambs. Haunted. The lawn grew very long before I could shake off the trauma and wield the trusty old Flymo again).
I made soups, stews, and bread; I experimented with turning leftover spaghetti into Spaghetti Pancake-ios (a dismal failure, in need of much cheese and ketchup). I took the kids to the library, the park, and into the field at the back of our house to play hide-and-seek in the hay. I told stories and made magazines; I stopped tantrums and night terrors; I made birthday cakes and threw birthday parties; I cleaned toilets; I bought stocking fillers from jumble sales and made endless mince pies; I got a job at sixteen and bought bunk beds, shoes, coats.
I did what girl-children have done since time immemorial—I took over what parts of running a household I could, as soon as I could, because I had read all the books and magazine articles about how to do this, and learned the tricks, and I then took pride in making things better. I saw problems, and I fixed them.
Yes, some days—mopping the kitchen floor, wiping mouse poo out of a cupboard, scrubbing the tannin stains out of the stainless steel sink—I would do some Cinderella-like sighing and think of all the American teens I saw on TV, who spent most of their sink-scrubbing time fretting about the prom; but I had been raised on Jane Eyre, Anne of Green Gables, Little Women. I knew to be a girl was to work in the home because homes do not make themselves. They must be made by someone. So why not take that power, and be the one who changes things, for the better? I took pride in being a thirteen-year-old girl who knew how to nurse a toddler though a fever; mend a torn buttonhole; make a gloomy, overcrowded bedroom look cheerful by stringing up some fairy lights, pushing all the mess under a younger sibling’s bed, and then threatening them if they made a fuss.
I knew all these skills would be useful later in life—when I had children, and a household of my own. I knew that “running a home” was a complex mechanism, with a million different tricks and knowledges to it, and I felt a bone-deep security in knowing that none of it was mysterious to me. I could do all of this. I was capable. I enjoyed being capable. I liked making things better—for pets, for children, for “The House.” I liked seeing how I could improve things. I knew none of this practice would be wasted.
When I went to other people’s houses, I saw them for what they were: a million decisions, purchases, problems solved, routines. I quietly applauded them in my head, for that gently glowing lamp, that pan that was exactly the right size, the prize-winning coziness of their curtains, that exemplary shoe rack, bath-time routine, herb garden, dog.
But when Andrew walks into a house—specifically, this house—he does not see this mechanism. He might see how gravity works on a falling orange—but he doesn’t see how the carpet stays clean. He can imagine, and describe, an event horizon two hundred million light-years away—its formation, its consequences—but he could not imagine and describe how his two nieces have learned, over endless months that felt as long as two hundred million light-years, to say “please” and “thank you.” There are no books and magazines, or blogs for teenage boys explaining this. He does not understand how this world—the world of domestica—works. And so, everything that both wearies me, and makes me proud, is invisible to him. He does not see what I do. Ninety percent of what I am does not exist to him. This is what feminism means when it talks about the “emotional workload” and the “second shift.” These jobs that women see and men, largely, do not.
And in Andrew—in this inability to see the ultraviolet spectrum of house, home, garden, and childcare—I can see my friends’ boyfriends and husbands, when they were teens. Living with a worldview that will abruptly clash when they enter into long-term relationships. Andrew just accepts everything domestic as “the way things work,” without understanding or questioning—in exactly the same trusting way I accept gravity and event horizons existing, without questioning or understanding. We are different.
This revelation reminds me of the fourth, and last, unspoken mystery that happens within the sealed citadels of marriage—the mystery of “What are you thinking? Really?”
WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? REALLY?
This is, perhaps, the question I ask Pete the most—outside of “Is the boiler supposed to be making that noise?” and, on the phone, “Are you near the shops?”
Whenever he is quiet, or thoughtful—whenever I see him staring into the middle distance, or frowning at something—I utter the most recurrent phrase of wives everywhere: “What are you thinking? Really?”
Here we are just last week, driving up to see his parents in Birmingham. I am in the car, feet up on the dashboard, and I am aware Pete hasn’t said anything for half an hour. He has a look of deep concentration on his face. He is, clearly, giving me a signal that he is thinking about something. I am going to find out what, like a good wife should!
“How you doing?” I say, to open proceedings.
“Good. Bit rainy.”
“Do you need anything?”
He thinks.
“Can I have another plum?”
“Of course!”
I give him the plum, from our customary Travel Bag of Plums, with a flourish. I leave another pause. Then:
“So—what you thinking?”
“That these plums are nice?”
I look at him. He still has the look of deep thought on his face, and has been silent for so long. I prompt him again.
“You can say all the things you’re thinking, you know. I’m ready for it. It doesn’t just need to be about plums. I’m ready for a heated debate!”
“That is everything I’m thinking!”
He seems almost indignant at my accusation that he is withholding his true feelings.
I, on the other hand, now feel edgy. This can’t be all he’s thinking. It can’t! He’s been silent for half an hour—he must have had nine thousand thoughts in that time. And if he’s not sharing them with me, they must be . . . secret thoughts. Or ones that need cajoling out. By me, his extremely loving and now slightly paranoid wife.
“Are you . . . worried about something?”
“No. It’s quite rainy, that’s all. I’m having to concentrate on the road.”
Fucking hell—this guy is really holding out on me. Deliberately. This is some mad mind game. I’m not going to engage. I’m now withdrawing.
“Fine,” I say, a little too briskly, and turn the music up.
“Have I done something wrong?” Pete asks, alarmed. “What have I done? I’m just driving! There’s nothing going on! I swear! I just like plums!”
“It’s fine,” I say, singing determinedly along to Aztec Camera, and feeling . . . like I so very often do. Like he’s obviously not telling me what he’s really thinking.
“WHAT ARE YOU really thinking?”
Women are constantly asking men what they’re thinking. And their reply never makes us happy.
For the first decade of our marriage and parenthood, I would regularly ask Pete, “What you thinking?”—mentally clearing the next half hour to engage enjoyably with his reply—only to feel terribly let down and uneasy when he would reply, “That it’s a lovely day!” or “That I am happy!” or “I think I will be . . . hungry in half an hour?”
I simply could not believe these answers. Clearly, they could not be true—they were obviously tactical, defensive replies, which indicated Pete was not ready to say what he really felt yet. I must dig deeper—making it clear to him he was in a safe space. He could now spill the fears, dreams, secrets, and plans, which he had repressed for decades, until now—in this queue for the cheese counter at Morrisons, where he could open up to me, his loving wife.
And so, for the first ten years of our marriage, my tender, engaged inquiry of “What you thinking?” invariably heralded a tense half hour or so of me meeting his “That I’m a bit sleepy?” with “Okay! Now we’re cooking! Do you think we should get a new mattress? There’s a deal on at the moment. I can order us one now! Or, do you think it’s more psychological—and that you’re worried about the kids? Three nit infestations in a month is quite high,” and he would reply, confused, “No: I just woke up for a piss at 3 a.m., and it took me a while to fall back asleep.”
And I would be convinced he was lying.
This tetchy, mutually bewildered impasse continued for years until, one day, we watched a Jerry Seinfeld stand-up DVD, and his bit about “What men are really thinking.”
“I know women don’t understand men,” Seinfeld says, amiably pacing the stage. “I know they’re looking at me right now, going, ‘I wonder what’s going on in that brain?’ I bet women would like to know the honest truth of what men are thinking. I bet you’d like to know right now. Well, shall I tell you what men are really thinking?”
The audience roars—men and women alike, high and low whoops. They wait. Here it comes! This is the big one! What’s he going to say?
“Nothing,” Seinfeld says, standing stock-still, and staring out at the audience. He looks at them for a long, long pause. “We’re not thinking . . . anything. We’re just . . . walking around, looking at stuff.”
There is a small pause—and then a huge, deep, bass affirmative man roar from the crowd. A truth has been spoken! Jerry has spoken the truth! The men rejoice! The high sounds of women, however, are missing. They are, clearly, in total shock.
“This is the only natural inclination of men!” Jerry continues. “Just kind of . . . checking stuff out. We work because they force us to, but other than that—this is really the only thing we want to do.”
The men in the audience were still wildly applauding, and the women in shock, when my husband paused the DVD, then pointed—dramatically, for him—at the TV screen.
“It’s true!” he said, in between relieved, hysterical laughter. “It’s TRUE! That’s it! We’re just dogs, sniffing around! We’re not thinking anything! Oh, Jerry, I love you.”
He pressed play on the DVD again, and we carried on watching, and laughing. I felt enlightened—if this really was true, and it seemed to be, this solved a massive mystery; plus, saved me another three decades of harassing my husband, in the car or at the cheese counter, to tell me secrets he didn’t actually have.
But as we continued watching, I was also aware that this posed a whole new question: why do all women who haven’t seen the Seinfeld routine presume men are sitting there, heads bursting with a billion secret plans—thinking, thinking, thinking, ceaselessly, and surely eager to, finally, say all these things out loud?
The answer is quite sad: It’s because we are. Ask a woman about anything—crockery, Scottish camping holidays, the best way to train a dog, how to get home from Vauxhall at 2 a.m. safely, what her plans are in the event of the total breakdown of society—and you will prompt a lengthy, thoughtful speech on her tactics, beliefs, experiences, research, and future plans. On a million subjects—some big, some small; some serious, some utterly ridiculous—women are always thinking, thinking, thinking. It never stops. Show me a woman frowning whilst hoovering, and I will show you a woman thinking about how best to set up an ISA for her niece, in case her unreliable father runs away with that strange woman she saw him with at Walmart last week.
We don’t daydream. We dayplan. We think, think, think, and plan, plan, plan, endlessly—because we know women must. We are aware that we are the half of the world that is generally poorer, and weaker, and busier. We know we so often only get one chance to prove ourselves—one hour to achieve something, one opportunity to change things—and so we want to be absolutely ready for it. We don’t want to be caught on the hop, because we don’t have the time, money, or power to rectify a mistake further down the line. We know that when a door opens, it usually only opens once—study after study has shown that women, along with people of color, are far more likely to be demoted, or fired, when they make a single mistake compared to white men. And that when disaster hits, as with Coronavirus, it’s women who are disproportionately affected: precarious, part-time jobs—the majority of which are done by women—put them most at risk. Domestic abuse rising. Children to be fed, educated, amused, and counseled through their fear.
This is why we game plan everything. It’s why we know our future children’s names when we’re six, and the wedding we want at ten, and what kind of cottage we want to retire to by the age of sixteen.
We are preparing because, when the crisis comes, we know it is women who will usually be the ones confided in, will be the ones asked for money, or shelter, or advice, and we must always be ready to spring into action.
We know that when a child, or friend, opens up, we need to be attentive, on point—mumbling, “Wow, I don’t know what to say—I’ve never really thought about this” could prompt them to clam up again, and the opportunity will be lost.
Women plan years into the future—because they have to. Our lives are big, slow-moving ships, laden with responsibilities and consequences—pregnancy, attack, abandonment, demotion—and so our constant thinking, thinking, thinking is because we are always ready for the alarm bells to ring, or our moment to come. We were raised like this. We know no other way. We are so used to thinking like this that we think it’s normal. And it is—for 52 percent of the population. We are, essentially, in a constant state of alarm. Panic. Readiness. It’s why, in an emergency, it is almost always the women who step forward, take over, say: “I know what to do.” When the world falls apart, it’s women who put it back together again.
I think, often, what we really mean when we say, “What are you thinking?” is “Ask me what I’m thinking.” If they have the time to listen to the entire contents of a woman’s head spill out, like a piñata, in a never-ending monologue that lasts from London to Solihull.
Thankfully, Pete does have that time. Now I’ve said all this to him. Now I’ve explained to him what women are thinking when they ask, “What are you thinking? Really?”