Housebitch
No one pays me to do my work, so it’s not actually work. “But you don’t have a job, Mama,” says my 9-year-old. No judgement. Facts. No one pays me to fuck either, but I do that too, joyfully. No one pays my husband to fuck me, but he does that too, joyfully. This month I’ll go on a writing retreat, away from my kids for four nights. No one pays me (I pay), but I do it. Exuberantly. I call my senators once a day (almost) to ask them to stop killing kids. (Fact. Kirstin Gillibrand’s office has never once answered their phone). I talk to my kid’s school about diversity. I motherfucking dust. Open a laptop. Make appointments for the kids. The days just fly.
It all became official this past September, the first time since I had someone sucking on my nipple for sustenance that I did not also have a school year to help launch. My tiny, radical, courageous school closed last June. I don’t think I want to be a teacher anymore. At least not for a while. I poured what I had into that school and for now, I’m spent. I can’t quite figure out what job would pay me enough to justify the stress it would put on my household for me to to be doing 40 hours a week for someone else. If we could afford me not getting paid indefinitely (we can’t), would I mind?
If I wrote two hours a day, did the food shopping, cooked the meals, picked up the kids, walked the puppy, kept this household moving and on track, gave and received orgasms, would I be a housewife or a writer? Would I be a feminist? Would I be hot? Would you want to talk to me at a dinner party? Would you ask me my opinions?
I’m actually a beast right now. Unfuckwithable. In charge. Holding shit down. Truth is, giving birth made me an animal too, and everything else is a veneer. Sometimes it’s all I can do to contain it. This thing of motherhood (what is the gender inclusive word that captures the second class status implied by the word “motherhood”?) and the house and you who try to keep us in it (and you do, you all do, the entire US economy rests on huge numbers of us doing unpaid or underpaid labor), you think you’re domesticating us, but I’ve never been closer to being completely untamed.
I was the most honest about the wildness after the first time I gave birth. My sense of smell alone—Magnificent. My whole body transformed into something to protect young. Our cat sensed this and would come nowhere near me and the baby. She was no threat, the gentlest of furred creatures, but she understood that I was temporarily of her animal kingdom and should be treated with the wariness we’re taught to give animal mothers in the wild. My skin was a charged surface; the brush of my partner’s fingers against my neck could make me gasp with pleasure.
He and I called ourselves mammals and our bed a cave.
Outside the sounds were often far too loud. Later, eventually, the bustle of the city was exactly the balm I needed to combat the isolation of early parenting. Although, it was a bit of a shock to discover how little you all wanted me and my young around. Say what you will about wanting spaces free of children’s disruptions, what that really means is that you’re telling the people (almost always women) caring for them that they are not welcome. It’s relegating us to the dreaded—by some—domestic space.
But what is the domestic? Places where babies are? The rooms inside a house? My womb?
Surprise. You’re the tamed ones. You walk in straight lines down sidewalks; talk quietly even when you’re mad or sad; follow other people’s rules as to where you can laugh, shout, sing, dance; follow other people’s schedules for when you can shit, eat, and sleep. Did my stroller interrupt the path of your morning jog? Pushing the babies and children and caregivers away is the same as pushing away the parts of yourselves who were never meant to live a day on the clock.
One more thing. Maybe some would call it a non sequitur. When the attempted decimation of the Palestinian people began, I could not shake this image: I wanted my body to become immense and I wanted to arch myself over all of Gaza, a giantess in a bridge pose, catching bombs. Becoming a mother has meant that every baby feels like my baby. That is how you all can get me, sometimes, take me out, exhaust me: That I have the need and not the power to protect the babies and children out there beyond my reach. How my body can both do everything and not enough. That is hard.
And now to you, my dear Nightbitch, and also to your readers and watchers. I think you are awesome. Truly. I like almost everything about you. I like the twitch of your eyebrow and how you found yourself a pack and how you learned to dismiss the Manhattan gatekeepers. I like how you fucked your husband in the shower. But a gentle reminder here, that it’s all connected. The economics that prefer you to question your worth, to not get paid well for your work (any of it, the parenting or the art), that isolates you and makes you feel crazy, is the same economics that is now eyeing a real estate opportunity in the ruins they’ve made of Gaza, that cannot provide dignified citizenship for its workforces, that wants to make sure we don’t get to decide what grows in our wombs, that are okay with us bleeding to death after a miscarriage. None of this is individual. Once your own life settles and you feel more settled in parenthood and if you and your specific partner figure out how to share the work of the house and your kids get older and are in school, will you forget the rest? How it felt to be untamed. How essential it is to howl and get dirty.
Remember please, polite society may welcome you back but that too is its own trap. Be wary.
With love,
Housebitch.
About the Author
Jade Sanchez-Ventura is a writer and radical educator. Her writing often tackles themes of mixed-race identity formation, female love and sexuality, finding home, motherhood as a social justice issue, and feminist, sex-positive, romantic partnership. Her essays have been published by Seal Press, Slice Literary Magazine, Huffington Post, Kweli Journal, Duende, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, The Establishment, and others. She has been featured on the Bitch Media Popaganda podcast, and awarded by the Mendocino Coast Writer’s Conference, Slice Literary Conference, and Disquiet International Literary Conference. She is the recipient of residencies with the Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow and Garden House and is a Hertog fellow. She is a series contributor with MUTHA Magazine. She recently finished writing a literary memoir, Not a Fine Woman. As an educator, she believes a commitment to racial equity and social justice are essential to the practice of teaching and spent twelve years studying and implementing this pedagogical approach with the Brooklyn Free School, an urban democratic free school. She now serves on the leadership team of the Brooklyn Free School Institute and on the Brooklyn Free School Board of Trustees. Though she has kin around the world, she grew up in Brooklyn, New York where she continues to make her home. She is a parent of two, and a devoted surfer of very small waves.
Author photo (c) Ro Agents-Juska
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