songs of experience

I doubt anyone will comment on my last post. I guess it was more of a rant. What can you say to that? Besides, nowadays, any opinions on the sanctified job of staying home with your brood (ahem, it’s holy but still unpaid) is tantamount to blasphemy. We’re turning into a bunch of Victorians, who kept their females indoors doing delicate “women’s work” … and if they felt sick from all this rarified air (who wouldn’t?!), what was prescribed? Why, more time indoors - a resting cure (which, of course, made them even sicker … until they became clinically hysterical).

We no longer call them “resting cures,” but I recently heard of a mother who “got away from the house” by shopping. Nothing too abnormal about that, right? Lots of people - especially Americans - use the shopping cure. Well, this lady’s day at the mall takes a turn toward the truly hysterical (using both definitions of that word). She consumes an entire morning or afternoon buying things “for the house,” or (maybe?) for herself, indulging in the giddy process of spending too much money for this or that item, then she likely has her giant latte treat before heading home to “confess” her purchases to hubby [he's the one who told me this story]. They have a ritualized argument about not wasting hard-earned money before she explains (and this is the crazy part), “I always take everything back.” Whaaaaaat?!

Back to the mall. Another day away. Away! “No harm done,” says Hubby. “It makes her happy.” Does it? This lady even argues, “It’s a net loss of zero.” Is it?

Wordsworth comes to mind:

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;”

Jean Lazarre said,

“When I left Benjamin (her son) behind in the mornings [to go to the library] it was not with a feeling that I was going to something unimportant, some manufactured interest which finally was only serving the purpose of getting me away from my child and the house. Rather, I went almost with a sense of mission. I saw those textbooks and records of adventures as bibles, or at least holders of answers to infinite mysteries.”

Amen, sister!