Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home - Hardcover

Stack, Megan K.

 
9780385542098: Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385542097 ISBN 13: 9780385542098
Verlag: Doubleday, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019

From National Book Award finalist Megan K. Stack, a stunning memoir of raising her children abroad with the help of Chinese and Indian women who are also working mothers

When Megan Stack was living in Beijing, she left her prestigious job as a foreign correspondent to have her first child and work from home writing a book. She quickly realized that caring for a baby and keeping up with the housework while her husband went to the office each day was consuming the time she needed to write. This dilemma was resolved in the manner of many upper-class families and large corporations: she availed herself of cheap Chinese labor. The housekeeper Stack hired was a migrant from the countryside, a mother who had left her daughter in a precarious situation to earn desperately needed cash in the capital. As Stack's family grew and her husband's job took them to Dehli, a series of Chinese and Indian women cooked, cleaned, and babysat in her home. Stack grew increasingly aware of the brutal realities of their lives: domestic abuse, alcoholism, unplanned pregnancies. Hiring poor women had given her the ability to work while raising her children, but what ethical compromise had she made?
     Determined to confront the truth, Stack traveled to her employees' homes, met their parents and children, and turned a journalistic eye on the tradeoffs they'd been forced to make as working mothers seeking upward mobility—and on the cost to the children who were left behind.
     Women's Work is an unforgettable story of four women as well as an electrifying meditation on the evasions of marriage, motherhood, feminism, and privilege.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Megan K. Stack is the author of Every Man in This Village Is a Liar, a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award. As a war correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, she reported from dozens of countries and was posted to Jerusalem, Cairo, Moscow, and Beijing. She was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting.

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Part One

How to Disappear
 
 
 
Chapter 1
 
It was a Tuesday morning and Tom was packing to leave me. He was headed out into the hinterlands, to a small town in south China where the Communist Party was cracking down on rioting factory workers. This was Tom’s kind of adventure—a trip out into the provinces, into The Real China, to witness a fracture in the power of the Party. A substantial assignment with a light dusting of adrenaline.

As for me, I was just trying to get comfortable. I experimented with pressing my spine straight against the floorboards, then raising my pelvis into the air. I sighed and groaned.

Rolling clothes into logs and stacking them upright in his backpack, Tom pointedly ignored me. 

“Are you really OK with going on this trip?” I asked churlishly.

“Come on,” he smiled at me. “You’re not due for two more weeks.”

“That means anytime from right now.” With a heave I rolled over to my side, letting the heavy sac of water and child splash dully onto the floor.

“The doctor said you’ll probably be late,” he pointed out cheerfully. “I bet it’ll be three more weeks.”

“You don’t know.” No, that wasn’t comfortable, either. I pulled air into my lungs and held it, trying to push my ribs off my womb.

“There are flights every hour.”

I sighed. The baby punched. He had to come out, somehow. My flesh stood in the way of his life. Tissue would tear, blood must flow, pain was a promise.

“I’m going to the airport straight from the office,” Tom dropped a kiss on my hair. “Text me and tell me what the doctor says.”

“Don’t go.” I was too hot to think straight. I begrudged him, in some confused way, the airports and adventures that I had relinquished. Maybe I sensed that our fates were about to diverge radically; maybe I was trying, clumsily, to make him share my inconvenience and immobilization. Maybe I just wanted a companion, my love, the baby’s father. Maybe I was scared.

“Honey,” he said. “I can’t sit here for four weeks.”

And he went.

*
 
“Your fluid is too low,” the doctor announced the next day. “He has to come out right away.”

“What?” She might as well have said I was pregnant with a kangaroo kid. The indignation I had unloaded on Tom was, at bottom, an empty flourish of spousal guilt. Never for a moment had I believed the birth was imminent. “Why is the fluid low? What do you mean, right away?”

“The fluid is low because he’s not peeing. That means he’s not getting nourished. This can happen with gestational diabetes. The placenta sometimes stops working.”

I was numb, trying to follow. Then a spike of horror. 

“He’s starving?”

“He’s not starving,” she said gently. “But he does need to come out now.”

“My husband isn’t here. I mean he’s traveling.”

She squinted at the ultrasound report, pen on her lips. “Can he be here tomorrow?”

“Yes.” Goddamn right he can. “Are you sure it’s okay to wait?”

“One day is OK. Go home. Take a long walk. Hopefully you’ll go into labor and we won’t need to induce.”

“So I’ll have the baby tomorrow.”

“If not tomorrow then Friday.”

“But the baby is coming now. Like, this week.”

“Yes.” She was laughing at me.

I called Tom, too shocked to be smug. Then, alone in the apartment, I started calling friends. I’m having the baby tomorrow. Repeating the words, I tried to make myself believe it was true.

I hadn’t packed a suitcase. Most pregnant women pack for the delivery months in advance. Checklists clutter the Internet: Soft pillow, relaxing music, favorite chocolate. But I, who had thrown together hundreds of suitcases for all manner of climates and crises, who had once kept a “go-bag” stuffed into my office closet for the next suicide bombing—I had never faced the ritual of packing this one, particular bag.

The baby was coming. I wasn’t ready. Tom wasn’t here. The entire enterprise was slipping off track.

I can no longer remember why this seemed important at the time, but during my pregnancy I’d become obsessed with the idea of a natural birth. I wanted to push my baby into the world through the vagina and without drugs. I told myself that I was a writer and an artist, a woman unbound by fear and pain and convention. I wanted the undiluted experience.

I knew everything about birth, or so I thought. Of course, I knew nothing about birth then, and I know nothing now. I only know that the only people who know anything about birth are women who are in the act. Like all great pain, like every altered state, it can only be apprehended from within. It can’t be anticipated or remembered.

I thought birth would be the texture of the soil; the color of the moon. I thought labor would be simple work. I thought pain would not be pain. In my imagination, it was like that.

I didn’t stop to consider that a truly “natural” birth would probably consist of a teenaged mother facing a decent chance of death, nor that there had been nothing natural about my pregnancy so far. I’d staved off motherhood with birth control while I built my career, only to discover that I needn’t have bothered. Pregnancy eluded me until I flew halfway around the world to undergo surgery for endometriosis.

A thirty-five-year-old frame stiffened and battered by decades of hard living and neglect, my body was hardly the youthful web of flexible ligament and muscle that biology would favor as its maternal vessel. “Advanced maternal age,” the doctor had written across the top of my file.

Nor was my temperament suited to natural birth. I’m a runner and an insomniac, not a yogi or meditator. I’d distinguished myself as the least relaxed mother in the Hypnobirthing class I’d attended with Tom in tow. The midwife had rolled her eyes and clicked her tongue over my tensed shoulders, so I ground my teeth and tried even harder to relax. I tried, really I did, and somehow that was part of the problem. I didn’t know how to stop trying.

During all this moony preparation, I hardly thought about the baby at all. This new human life was a misty idea, a blurred bundle of my own emotion wrapped in an impossibly fluffy blanket which, come to think of it, I didn’t own.

It was a lot to think about. Maybe this is how our contemporary psychology confronts massive change. Couples drown out a fear of lifelong commitment by obsessing over iris-and-ivy centerpieces and the vocabulary of the vows. Who wants to think about diapering and colic when you can sip chamomile tea with beatific pregnant ladies and swap tactical advice designed to outmaneuver the dreaded obstetrician? (“They’re surgeons, you know. They think it’s their job to cut you open.”)

I approached birth with the competitive, adrenalized mentality of hard-charging newspaper work. Labor was an arena in which I would struggle and—inevitably, eventually—triumph. I would do it. Me. Motherhood itself lurked out in the margins of an old map, scribbled with sea creatures. Here be dragons.

Tom struggled to get home. Thunderstorms raged...

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Verlag
Doubleday
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385542097
ISBN 13 
9780385542098
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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