More Kool-Aid?
~I’d LOVE some!
So you’re at that interminable suburban dinner party, staring at the faux ficus and wondering why in the hell you agreed to come.
A beaming Yogazon approaches, spritzer in hand, oblivious to your feck-off-and-go-talk-to-someone-else body language. She introduces herself (Kim/Kelly/Sharon/Julie) and launches right off with the most reviled question of all time;
“So what do YOU do?”
Me? I’m a photographer!
I’ve hated this question since I had a ‘real’ job, which has been almost a decade now, but even more so since being an SAHM. What’s the appropriate response? “I specialize in handmade creative play clay, non-organic PBJ sandwich construction, agenda note-checking, language acquisition and organization of various lessons, including water safety, body movement and artistic expression in various mediums”? Sure. But as I glance nervously at my shoes, it comes out sounding more like, “I stay at home with my kids.” Guilty, awkward grimace.
Fer der kerds lurnches! Derp.
Why is our society so determined to identify and classify each other by our work occupations? I mean, if you’re a studly Robert Kincaid type, getting sent all over the world taking breathtaking pictures for National Geographic and poking lonely Italian farm wives, then great. If you quit your job driving a school bus to pursue your dream of building tree houses out of non-toxic, reclaimed materials for inner-city playgrounds, awesome! You’re the monk that sold his Ferrari? Let’s yak! If it’s your passion, feel free to regale the crowd. But for the majority of us, the response to the question only tells the other person what we do from 9-5. And what happens during that eight hours, m’dear, is usually hardly enough to define us. Taxonomy=Fail.
A number of years ago, when I had two very young chitlins at home and was looking for any way to 1) get the hell away from them for any period of time and 2) start reshaping my body into something a little less Danny DeVitoesque, I decided to take up Aikido. Aikido is a non-aggressive martial art which teaches how to wind down one’s opponent, using their energy against them…which is, as you can imagine, a pretty dope skill for a harried mother to possess.
One day I got paired up with a brown belt. She gave off a kind of Mary Hartman vibe, but she was a real bruiser. When it was time to take a break, we grabbed our water and sat down on the mat together.
Mousy housewife you say?
I’ll kick yer ass!
“What’s your life?” she asked.
I was flummoxed. No one had ever asked me that before and truth be told, I didn’t understand what she meant at first. Then it dawned on me; she wanted to know what my real life was, who I loved, what I loved to do, what I’d love to do sometime in the future, and she didn’t give a flying fuckadoo whether I was the CEO or cleaned the CEO’s office by day. My eyes poured forth amber lovelight.
As the years have passed, I’ve heard the question posed a gadgillion more times, give or take a googol. I still twitch a little when I hear it, but I understand that it’s just another one of those lowest-common-denominator phrases people say to each other, like the obligatory “how are you?” or “how was your weekend?” or “how long you think ’til the Biebs asks Selena to borrow her Louboutins?”
Me, I want us to share the important stuff, what we love. What’s your life?
Erin's Clishmaclaver 