Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life : Or How I Learned to Love the House, the Man, the Child
by Faulkner Fox
Three Rivers Press, $12.00
272 pages, ISBN 1400049407
Review by Kristy Dallas Alley
When Faulkner Fox had a three year old and a nine month old, she was terribly unhappy. So she tells us in the first line of her memoir,
Dispatches From A Not-So-Perfect Life, and so she continues to tell us, in a myriad of ways, throughout the rest of the book. It was the mid-nineties, and the realities of life with small children as a mostly-stay-at-home Mom seem to have taken her by surprise. As a staunch feminist, former lobbyist for an abortion rights organization, writer, and academic, she felt sure of herself and her roles, but as a mother and co-parent, she found the footing somewhat less sure.
During the period Fox discusses in
Dispatches, she and her husband were both working at the University in Austin, Texas; she as an adjunct instructor teaching a few hours a week, and he as a full-time professor actively trying for tenure. She also wrote for four hours a day in a garage office while her boys were either with a sitter or in preschool. This particular set of circumstances is significant for several reasons: it sets the stage for the many deviations from what she calls “equitable parenting” that occurred during that time, and it sets Fox’s situation apart from that of most other families in America. Of the former, Fox is bitterly aware, but of the latter she seems blissfully oblivious.
Because Fox was mostly at home and her husband was mostly at work, she found herself taking on the lion’s share of childcare and housekeeping duties. Apparently, she had thought this would not be the case. And while she goes so far as to admit that it made logical sense to her that this would happen, the fact that all duties were not split exactly 50/50 caused her outrage and depression. She had married a man she actually met at a feminist rally, and she knew that he believed in women’s total equality. Why, then, was she washing his underwear and nursing his babies while he was off in the world of work and other adults? This is the kind of question that drove Fox not only to distraction, but also to sometimes-irrational behavior. For example, her creation of “Frequent Parenting Miles,” in which she documented in great detail every second she and her husband spent (separately) taking care of the children. Activities logged included breastfeeding (but not pumping, since she could still read by propping the book up with her foot), shopping for their food, washing their clothes, playing, reading, and travel to and participation in kid-centered activities. Frequent Parenting Miles provided documentation and proof that equitable parenting was not happening, but not surprisingly, it did little to change the situation.
Like many of her Mother-peers, Fox sought help in therapy. For the reader, a breakthrough seems imminent when she has to prove to her therapist that she is a “real writer,” because 90% of the therapist’s patients tell her they are writers. But the realization that so many women fantasize about her not-so-perfect life only serves to deepen her guilt over not being happier. Similarly, she is unable to see her husband’s work as his contribution to the family because it is work that he loves, not work he is forced to do to bring in money. This distinction seems to blind Fox to the dynamic of many of the families around her, and that blind spot is a major cause of the alienation she feels from the other mothers around her.
Fox’s inability to make friends with other mothers is a major topic of discussion in
Dispatches. She can’t understand why she has such a hard time relating to them, even as she depicts them as mindless drones, happily singing along at Kindermusik and pushing strollers around the park without an individual thought in their collective pretty heads, while she, in contrast, realizes “I didn’t want to be singing ‘The Farmer in the Dell’ at 10:00 on a Tuesday morning with a bunch of white women!” Her rage over the absence of fathers at Gymboree class is a perfect example of her obsession with what she sees as inequity run amok. In Fox’s mind, 10:00 on a Tuesday is when all the important people are at work doing important things. In which case, in mid-nineties Austin, Texas, all the important people are men and women who have “real” jobs, not stay-home mothers like Fox. This seems to be the crux of her unhappiness. For all her (albeit convincing) declarations that she loves and adores her children and can’t bear to leave them, she is apparently unable to see her work with them as important in the same way that, say, a corporate job is important. Not only does this shortsightedness separate her from the other women around her, it separates her from many “second-wave” feminists as well as other authors in the growing genre of motherhood memoirs.
Dispatches From A Not-So-Perfect Life is sometimes funny, as when Fox replies to her midwives’ claim that some women have orgasms during childbirth, (“Which women? The ones who practice up by masturbating with chain saws?”), undeniably brave in its honesty, and often overwhelming in its anger. While other memoirs in its class, such as Andrea Buchanan’s
Mothershock or Susan Maushart’s
The Mask of Motherhood seek to offer some level of solace to mothers by exposing and exploding cultural myths about the experience of becoming a mother,
Dispatches seems more like Fox’s rationalization of her own enormous anger and inability to adjust to changes in her life that she herself chose to bring about. While she does eventually come, as the book’s title claims, to love the house, the man, the child, this fact seems more a consequence of time’s passing and her children’s aging than of any ability on her part to make peace with the realities of marriage and parenthood.
