I often know it’s a time to write, when all my emotions are caught up in my chest and pulling in a new breath feels difficult. My direction seems lost, and my thoughts are scattered, and I start wondering, “How and why did I find myself here?” I'm sorry. I know the happy picture above suggested this blog would be happy, but it doesn't entail our magical trip into the Arctic Circle, though there is a gallery of photos below from the trip.
It’s Feb. 8th, and I just feel the passage of time and building up of deadlines. I just took my math 2 exam last week, and if I pass, then it will be a big surprise. I’m not saying that in modesty. I mean, I literally only completed half of the exam because I didn’t know how to do the rest, and you need a 50% to pass the exam. So, the highest score I can get on the exam if everything I did was perfect is a 50%. Fortunately, thanks to my homework grade, which is 99% and makes up half of my course grade, if I don’t pass the exam, I should still be able to pass the class. I put should there because I’ve met with a few unpleasant surprises when it comes to the grading of the two classes I’ve complained most about on this blog: math and physics.
I won’t go into what happened because I don’t want this blog to become a rant; I did enough ranting last week. What I need this blog to be is an opportunity to process the emotions that are currently circulating through my body.
In my last blog, I talked about how solo parenting helped me to verbalize my priorities. I had the acronym MOSS for mother, organize, study, self-care/socialize. When I was explaining this acronym to Bochuan while he was still in Lapland, after I said the first “S” was for study, he expected me to say that the second “S” was for spouse. In my head I thought, “Of course you did.” Patriarchy. God forbid a woman take care of herself when there’s a man she could be taking care of instead!
I did think he had a point though. Where in all this were we working on our relationship? So, I came up with a new acronym that I like even more: S’MORE.
Self-care/Socializing
Motherhood
Organization
Relationship
Education
I like this acronym because if I think about everything in terms of equal percentages, it takes education and makes it only about 20% of my life. When you do the math on hourly expectations for education, I was surprised to find that 40 hours divided by the 168 in a week, is only 24%. However, my role as a student looms so large in my head. I take my identity as a student so personally, as though it is me.
With the exception of math 2, all of my grades from last semester are in, and my current grade point average (GPA) is a 3.95 on a 5.0 scale. It’s a lot higher than I honestly expected during the midst of a very stressful fall semester. Though I know my math 2 grade will cause it to drop a bit, it's still higher than the 2.5 I was hoping I could achieve. So, great, right?
Well, I’m not used to this. My GPA my first semester of college at Temple University was also a 3.95, but on a 4.0 scale. So, I’m accustomed to very high grades, and more than that, I’m accustomed to good teaching. And the first semester, as I’ve previously stated, was not a demonstration of that. I’d like to repeat that the second semester has been better, and I can already see the incorporation of student feedback into how courses are carried out. And while I know, because they’ve said so, that how crappy the first semester was will be taken into consideration when they are deciding who to hire, for example, as a junior research assistant to work over the course of this summer—a position I’m applying for—I still can’t help feeling a mixture of anger, regret, frustration, and insecurity when I receive grades I don’t feel represent my effort or ability.
And all of this brings me back to “Dare to be Adequate!” It’s so hard, even in a context where I know that grades are not as important, and I think a GPA of 3 or above shows sufficient mastery of the content. Also, my current GPA includes that 1 score I mentioned in my previous post, which should change when I retake the exam next month because I’ll actually have had time to prepare for the exam. I could also retake the math 2 exam at the end of April if I wanted to try for a higher score. But to what end? Why does this number mean so much to me? Why do I use it to define so much of myself, if at best, from a time perspective, I should only commit 20-ish percent of my time to it?
And let’s face it, that 40 hours a week must include meals and commute and so on because productivity doesn’t work like that. I can’t just magically appear on campus, sit down and study for 3-4 hours productively, eat lunch, and then do another 3.5 hours of work. After which, I will magically appear at home in time for Alaya to return from daycare. I wish!
This brings me to the questions I asked in my previous post, which I’ll repaste here:
What did I need? How did I ask for it? What could I let go of? How much could I really accomplish in a day?
What were my individual priorities? What were our priorities as parents? What were our priorities as a couple and as a family?
What values would govern how we prioritized our time?
Bochuan and I recently created a spreadsheet where we listed all the household and parenting tasks we could think of in a given week. Bochuan then had the bright idea to assign the estimated time duration of each task per week and a few other features. You can see a snapshot of part of the list in the photo below. We then tried to divide up the tasks evenly. There were six loads of laundry to do each week. I’d do 3, and he’d do 3. We’d cook 4 big dinners a week because Bochuan was now in school full-time too studying Finnish intensively seven hours a day, five days a week. So, we’d both eat lunch at school, and this cut down our grocery shopping from three times a week to two times a week. I’d go grocery shopping one time, and he’d go another time. I’d cook two of the dinners, and he’d cook the other two. And after we divided everything up, what did we discover?
First, we spend about 90 hours a week in taking care of Alaya and our home. This doesn’t include things like eating dinner or taking Alaya outside to play or other time we just spend together. This is just the time we spend cooking, cleaning, giving Alaya a bath, and so on. If that number isn’t startling to you, just remember that we tend to think of a full-time job as 40 hours a week. And Bochuan and I both were already in school full-time.
I had said in my previous blog post that solo parenting really caused it to sink in that being a Mom was a full-time job, but this data gave me the actually numbers. And the actual numbers after Bochuan and I divided everything up “evenly,” showed that he was at about 30 hours of parenting / housework, and I was at about 60.
And when I saw that number I thought, “That feels right.” When you look just at the numbers for house work, it is pretty evenly divided (22 and 24 hours), but when it came to parenting, I was definitely doing the heavy lifting. And keep in mind, this was the result when we purposefully went through the list and divided things “evenly.” To be honest, thus far in our marriage, the housework numbers have always skewed more to my side.
And the realization I came to when I looked at this data was, “Wow, patriarchy.” In speaking about this, I’m not condemning Bochuan for anything or men in general because, as I’ve read recently “patriarchy has no gender” (bell hooks) and “patriarchy has no winners” (Sebene Selassie). The realization that I came was this:
I, Maxi-Ann Campbell, genuinely believe that in order to be worthy of love, I need to do at least 60-70% of the housework and parenting in 50% of the time (or preferably less) so that I can continue to maintain the false image that my husband is doing his fair share. Because to suggest that he’s not would be suggesting that I’m taking care of him, instead of him taking care of me, which would, supposedly, be emasculating. I must do as much as I can in as little time as possible so that I can give him and honestly myself the impression that I’m dependent on him because that will inspire his primal instinct to take care me and sustain our marriage.
That's foolishness, but it's the rules I've been playing by for as long as I can remember.
To suggest that I’m primary parent, primary housework person, and the primary reason we were able to move to this country (that Bochuan said he wanted us to move to) sounds kind of awful doesn’t it? And dare I say, perhaps a bit cocky? Because if a woman asserts how much she contributes too loudly, then all of her “femininity” is lost, right?
Beyond this, Bochuan’s love language is words of encouragement. I want to be able to express my gratitude for all he does, because hey, those 30 hours he’s doing count! When I was doing everything while solo parenting, I didn’t realize it in the midst of it, but I noticed afterward that I was carrying a lot of tension in my body that I could slowly release with Bochuan’s support.
So, how do you say, “Hey babe, I genuinely appreciate all you’re doing, but… do more”?
Well, fortunately, this spreadsheet did all the talking. Bochuan looked at me and said, “Do you want me to do more?” I responded with, “The short answer is yes. Do you want to hear the long answer?” He said, “No, it’s late.” And it was late. I resisted the urge to respond with, “Do you need to ask?”
I recently bought Nedra Tawwab’s book Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself. In the book she said that when setting boundaries, you don’t need to explain. In fact, don’t explain. When you explain, it becomes a negotiation. One's boundaries aren’t meant to be up for negotiation. But I hope when we again have time, we’ll talk more honestly about how our time is interconnected.
I don’t think Bochuan yet fully appreciates the connection between the time he spends say studying Finnish and the time I don’t get to study for my classes. Right now, he’s also taking a Finnish course in the evening. This course isn’t necessary, but he wasn’t sure about the quality of the intensive Finnish program offered by Finland’s employment agency, which we’d heard in one podcast wasn’t very good. But he loves his intensive class, and he says the teacher is good and that they’ll catch up to his evening class very quickly. And I can’t help but wonder, so why am I on Alaya duty from 7-8:30 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays if this class isn’t essential? That is time he could be spending with Alaya so I could be doing schoolwork or one of the many household tasks I’ve been assigned.
If we do divide those 90 hours evenly, that’s 45 hours for each of us. That’s 15 more hours that Bochuan suddenly needs to find during his week. Where will that time come from? The other thing Tawwab says in her book—and this might seem obvious, but we like to pretend that it’s not true—is that “We can’t make more time.”
We can’t make more time.
And what I actually really want to ask Bochuan to do isn’t more, but less, in this case, Finnish or other classes (he’s recently signed up for driving lessons too), so that he has the capacity to do more housework and parenting. And this is how he can take care of me.
I think Bochuan believes, and it’s true, that he needs good Finnish to be able to get a job. And he further believes that getting a job is how he can take care of me and Alaya. But I can get money. I can make money. The thing I’ve been offered most since we made this decision to quit our jobs and move to Finland is money. If things get tight, we have friends and family who are like, “Let us know.”
What I need, what I can’t make, is time. So, I need to borrow his time. And that time isn’t directly for me. It’s for the upkeep of our home and the care of our daughter. And I think it’s a good place to start.
Because if you do the math, 40 hours on school, 45 hours on parenting and housework, and 49 hours on sleep (research suggests that most humans need between 7-9 hours of sleep), there aren’t many hours left. That’s 134 hours of 168, and that doesn’t include eating, showering, or commuting. And this is the time situation when everyone is healthy! If any of us gets sick, particularly if that person is Alaya, then the overtime is no joke. So, where do we fit self-care/socializing and relationship building? These two things are essential and would make up some 40% of my time, if I could divide up my priorities evenly.
I don’t have any answers, but at least I know why it’s hard.
When you take into consideration the 60+ hours I’ve been doing of housework and parenting, my grades are actually pretty spectacular. At least I can understand why I so rarely get even seven hours of sleep and why I feel so tired all the time. In a recent podcast, someone compared being sleep-deprived to driving on a flat tire. You can technically get to your destination, but it won’t be a smooth ride, and you might cause damage to your car along the way.
I’m almost always driving on a flat tire.
The other big realization I had while solo parenting was that I’ve achieved most of my accomplishments in life through internal pressure. I apply pressure to myself to get good grades, degrees, jobs, accolades, and so on. And the question I came to, again while listening to a podcast, was, “Can I succeed from a place of internal well-being?” What does it mean to succeed in this context? What is it I’m afraid of losing if I live my life with a sense of ease instead of a constant vigilance?
What am I afraid of losing? And will constant vigilance keep me from losing it when life is actually just a series of losses? Two quotes that help me zoom out at times like this and put things in perspective are as follows:
“No matter your circumstances, you will end up losing everything you love, you will end up aging, you will end up ill and the problem is that we need to figure out how to make that all be alright.” (Jane Hirshfield)
“I am of the nature to age; I have not gone beyond aging. I am of the nature to sicken; I have not gone beyond sickness. I am of the nature to die; I have not gone beyond dying. All that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will change, will become otherwise, will become separated from me.” (Buddha)
If, as we walk this life, we are heading toward loss anyway, can’t I live with more ease and less clinging to identities, accomplishments, even relationships that will change in any case?
Maybe.
Bochuan arrived home after writing this blog, and I had a smile on my face because the writing had helped me to process my emotions. But I still needed to talk about how our time was interconnected. So, that night I told Bochuan that we both had two trays. On our trays were school and housework / parenting responsibilities. Every time he added something to the school work side, because of his inability to make more time, something from the housework / parenting side would fall off his tray and onto mine. And because of my inability to make more time, something would fall off my tray on the schoolwork side. I reminded him that there were not one, not two, but three classes I was supposed to be taking this semester that I had put off to future years to make my workload more manageable in the context of my housework / parenting responsibilities. I told him that I was just treading water, and I was telling him because I didn't think he knew. That's the other thing that Tawwab says. People don't know what you need. They don't know what your boundaries are. You have to tell them.
This whole conversation took less than five minutes, but I could see on Bochuan's face that he understood at an emotional level, a level deeper than the pure hours (60/30) inspired. He told me that he didn't know that I was struggling, and I believe him. Despite all my insecurities, all my failings, I think many people look at me and a see a strong, capable woman. People are like, "Maxi's going to be okay." And I will be okay, but I'll be better with Bochuan's help, and that's what I told him. I said, I used to believe that I could succeed on my own, but I need your help. I can thrive with his help.
So, that's where we are. I'll let you know how it goes. Tawwab also says that you can't just set your boundaries once. It's a constant process. It'll be easy for me to just keep taking on more housework/parenting responsibilities or not letting Bochuan do more of it because it's a habit of mine. But I also bought Tawwab's matching workbook to help me learn how to set boundaries and, more importantly, how to ask for help.
I hope 2022 will be a year that I can thrive from a place not of internal pressure but of internal well-being.
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