Mistress of None: Notes from Home

In the spirit of believing, even though it is manifestly and verifiably never ever ever true, that if I could just organize my life perfectly I would never ever ever fall into sin and trouble, I did spend another angsty week flirting with the idea of another schedule overhaul. I should just rearrange these two moments, I said to myself, and wake up seven hours earlier, and then everything will fall neatly into place. I will stop being the failure that I am.

Jordan Peterson, somewhere or other, makes a helpful distinction between power and competence. The two are not really the same, but they share some similarities, and I think I am always confusing the two. When I am not competent at something, when I haven’t mastered it, I feel stupid and awful, and so then I exert my frustrated will in the realm of power. I try to fix it by fixing the people around me, getting them to stop doing the thing that angers me about myself.

As I mentioned to a friend this week, I think most of the women in the west, just to generalize so broadly that it will take you only thirty seconds to prove me wrong, are unhappy in house keeping, and in “wifedom” in general, because of the lack of competence in any one sphere. There are So Many spheres in which they have to dwell that there just isn’t time enough, at least in human terms, to do even one of them all the way to completion, to the point of being satisfied and being able to sit back and enjoy a sense of mastery. And so they (obviously I’m talking about myself) flit from one realm to the other doing everything badly, accompanied always by their pinging phones, and finally screaming at everyone in a powerful rage, or developing anxiety and depression.

Similarly, children don’t often have the time and space to gain mastery over anything, either because they aren’t given the material opportunity, being always rushed on to the next activity or subject, or because they are protected from the struggle itself. I am guilty, I will admit, of rushing my children, in the same way that I rush myself. But don’t worry! I do feel really bad every time I do it!

I am not eager to blame myself, though. I would like at this moment, to blame both society and the technology that society has embraced. Too many things (remember, that’s a technical word) are expected of me. I can’t do them all. Literally. I just can’t. But I believe in the core of my being that I can. I just need to try harder and by more junk. In this way I will gain mastery and competence and become the wholistic and embodied person I expect myself to be. This is the deep magic of American Consumerisim. That it may involve me being just an itty bitty bit of a controlling jerk in order to get it all done is not on the warning label at the back, because that would ruin it.

The limits of the self in time and space should be as life giving as the limits of the open blank page and the keyboard. They should be a place of creativity and invention–not of more devices to save time, but of mastery and discipline. By working really hard in one single sphere, say, cleaning the house, a person should be able to gain satisfaction and joy in the outworking of that task. But when cleaning the house is jumbled onto the same page as raising the children, doing email, finishing a project, digging up the garden, buying food, cooking food, sorting out Halloween costumes (because I’m a reckless pagan), remembering to get the children through their school, arguing with the internet, and some other stuff that I’ve forgotten, the room for creative competency flees away. The woman who does, by sheer force of awesomeness, get her whole life in order is then called Super Woman, and all the other women bask her exhausted shade and feel guilty about their lives.

There is no solution of course. I can add to myself another law, of trying to “live in the moment,” of “being over doing.” But because I can’t satisfactorily Do, I never really get the opportunity to Be, and so that is just another realm in which to feel bad about everything.

Now, let me see, I bet there’s something cool on Pinterest that will help me reorganize my day. Pip pip.