Everybody In - the Secretary Pool!
Here's what I did after work yesterday before heading out to my monthly book club get together to discuss "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath. I got a ride home from ou81aswell, Sooey's Webmaster, (and not his real name), ran across the street without even looking, went into my apartment and immediately started obsessing over the pictures on my walls and how they are placed, started re-arranging things in spite of a gnawing hunger, ate a huge piece of homemade (by me) key lime pie, changed into a pair of fancy lacey undies (???) that turned out to be picky and too tight, ran to the bus stop, got picked up at the bus station 20 minutes later.
Luckily, the hostess for that evening is married to a fellow who likes to cater in his spare time and I was able to eat a proper meal of tiny perfect hors d'oeurvres before we launched into a discussion of the crazy world of Sylvia Plath - which struck me as not so crazy as my body recovered from the mild cold sweat and sugar shakes I had experienced on the bus ride to the point where I almost - almost - thought I should say something to somebody: "I may look like a normal well-adjusted person to you, but here's what I just did..." in case I fainted or something and people thought it was for a valid reason and panicked instead of just giving me bread and water, which is all I would have deserved by way of treatment, if you really stop and think about it.
I certainly never do until it's too late and I'm well into a cold sweat and sugar shakes.
Anyway, I was well primed for "The Bell Jar" and a discussion about Esther's spiral into depression, something I have been profoundly lucky to have never experienced, although I didn't realize I was an anorexic (not sort of, not kind a - an absolute anorexic with all the attendant symptoms) until I was in middle-age. And now I think about it, I was a mother-at-home with children who really had to force herself every day to leave the house, go for a walk, talk to somebody - not on the phone - face to face. A stranger on the walk ("nice day, eh") qualified as a conversation, then I could allow myself to go back in the house.
My mother used to say during those days (by phone - she lived 500? miles away), "It's the routine that saves you."
Or does it just hide crazy?
But we all have our trials and tribulations and I certainly never experienced the sort of mental illness Esther does, a descent which results in a chilling round of electro-shock therapy. One of our members pointed out her premonition of what was to come with Esther's early on fixation with The Rosenbergs and their deaths by electrocution. Burning to death, essentially, is how she "feels" their official sentences. Condemned to burn to death.
Still, Esther wasn't so crazy that she didn't have an amazingly accurate fix on the world of work for women. For instance, in spite of her mother warning her that she needed to learn how to type to be able to secure employment for herself, Esther refuses because she doesn't want EVER to be a secretary and she knows that if she learns how to type, that's exactly what will happend. Now THAT resonated with me because my mother did the same thing except she had an influence and power over me that Esther's mother never had over her and I learned how to type.
And in spite of an Honours B.A. in History and English from the University of Toronto - I have never been more than a secretary in my entire work life. And I hate being a secretary. I HATE IT.
I. HATE. IT. I've always hated it. Being a secretary is the worst, most degrading job imaginable. There. I've said it. So why do it? Well, "The Bell Jar" answered that for me - because I learned how to type. See? You can think you're saner'n some woman who had electrodes attached to her head and many many volts sent shooting through her brain, but at the end of the day, who learned to type and who didn't. So I asked around my book club and guess what? Out of eight women, six of whom stayed home with kids when they were younger, five of whom went back to work after a few years - only one of them learned to type and only one of them is working as a secretary.
Interesting, eh? But the most interesting response to the whole typing thing came from the one woman among us who has the most education (3 degrees), the highest standard of living (married to the male version of herself), and is a defiant stay-at-home mother (one of her degrees is in law). She said that learning how to type was the workplace equivalent of getting pregnant in high school because you were too stupid to use birth control.
Gulp. I didn't become sexually active (outside of my imagination, at least) until I was in University and even then, well, let's just say I was very lucky. Or not, maybe, since I already knew how to type and would only ever be a secretary, anyway, in spite of my having gone to University for four years.
But I'm always curious about women who seem in control of their lives, who know what they want (left or right, quite frankly) and live that way without letting society (left or right) have any affect on their decisions. Curious is putting it mildly, maybe. I'd like to get inside their souls for just a few minutes and find out HOW they do it. So I asked my fellow book clubber how she manages to stay her course and not get a job, earn her own money, all that stuff that catches up with some of us who think we can stand to live lives financially dependent on better halves and then can't.
She said, "I control all our money. Always have. I move it around, invest it. We wouldn't have any of this if it wasn't for me."
Which, correct me if I'm wrong, Dear Reader, is pretty much like being a broker - isn't it? Anyway, so much for that last thread of hope. She also took/takes copious notes on all our books and provides her insights after we've all hashed it out and exhausted every bit of information about ourselves since our last book club get together because we still have that mother-at-home hangover that compels us to talk, talk, talk while you've got other adults at hand to listen to you.
Oh, one more thing, Esther had major issues with men, we all noticed. Her sexuality scared her, men were off putting to her, professionally they were untrustworthy because they treated her as a non-person. We didn't even get into that discussion, which I only realized later in the car as I was getting a ride home from another book club member whose teenaged daughter got her a job by taking her to the computer, bringing up a job site that had the perfect job for her on it, and showing her how to send off her resume. I mentioned that to her and she said, "We don't have time, anymore." And I said, "You know, we don't seem to be pissed off anymore, either."
And it's true. I remember when we started out and six out of eight of us were mothers-at-home. We were an angry lot. We thought the other two of us weren't as angry because they were younger, but now I think it was because they had part-time jobs and earned their own money. Which was all Esther really wanted, she wanted to make a living as a writer - and she was willing to work to do it, she just didn't want to fall into any traditional female traps along the way. But that was back in the early 60s, I started working in the early 80s, now it's the new millenium and everybody does their own typing because unless you're online, you're out of the loop.
Now, everybody's a secretary.
