When I was in New Mexico I went to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. I didn’t know much about O’Keeffe, but I was curious. One of her paintings, The Barns, Lake George captured my attention. She painted it in 1926. It is of two massive barns, one seen from the side, the other seen from one end, as if they are lined up at a right angle. The massive hulks of the black barns fill the canvas. Off to one side is another structure, a tiny slice of what looks like a cabin or studio. That wall is red.
In one barn there are two small lighted windows, each with 6 panes. In an arresting small detail one of the panes is black. Is it covered over or is the pane missing? It looks like a tooth that has been knocked out, a remnant of some violence or accident that no one has bothered to repair.
The museum’s information said that O’Keeffe fled towards the barns to escape her husband’s family. Alfred Stieglitz, her husband, not only paved the way for photography as a modern art, he launched O’Keeffe’s career at his influential gallery.
His family’s home at Lake George was a gathering place for waves of visitors, relatives and friends, a place where Stieglitz spent every summer. O’Keeffe found the noise and people too much, and fled to her studio. I imagine the studio is what we see in the tiny slice of red at the side of the painting, the one bright spot in the shadow of the hulking barns.
The painting spoke to me, not just because of O’Keeffe’s artistry, but because I understand that feeling of too many people, the introvert surrounded by extroverts. I don’t know if she was a woman forced to care for, entertain or feed those people, but I understand the oppressive weight of too many bodies, needs, demands, noise.
When I was in my thirties, a single mom, I would stay up until two or three in the morning on the weekends to write, because it was the only time I could be alone and undisturbed. I remember the focus I had in the room off the kitchen, the children asleep on the other side of the house, the keyboard under my fingers. I would write until I couldn’t anymore, then I would dance around to music on my headphones for the sheer joy of it. I remember the times and places I wrote the way other people remember the best meals they ate or where they drank the perfect bottle of wine, or a particular theater performance; vividly, with a nostalgic warmth.
O’Keeffe did not have children. In a video playing in a small room at the museum, O’Keeffe describes herself as lucky. She was lucky. She got to do her art in unlimited swathes of time, and she didn’t have to work a day job for most of her long life, her art supported her and her travels and the house outside of Santa Fe.
I had a pang of regret when I imagined what my life would have been like if I could have had more time to write, if my art hadn’t been squeezed in those late-night slices of the weekend, between working and raising children and all the other noise. Some of it was joyful noise. Raising the kids, our small family of three, was gift. The jobs, not so much.
Raising children has always been a noisy, time-consuming endeavor. The rich can outsource much of the labor of it and the attendant domestic arrangements to others. Some lucky people have family who help. But most of us pay for childcare, like I did, which means working demanding jobs or more hours to pay for the expense of it, which in some cities like mine can cost more than college tuition.
In heterosexual couples, women still do most of the housework and childcare and manage the extensive enterprise of it all – scheduling appointments for pediatrician and orthodontist, shuttling people to and from sports activities and lessons, managing the food shopping and meal planning and making sure people have clean clothes to wear. And the emotional labor; making sure everyone is ok, monitoring the baby for a new tooth, the grade school kid for being bullied, the teen for depression and the husband for whatever it is that he thinks he needs from her.
Of course, every couple is different, and some men do participate equally or fully in parenting or managing a household. I’m not here to argue about that. What I am doing is naming the cost to women of that unpaid, unrecognized labor. I didn’t have a husband or co-parent around – he lived in another country, so it was cleanly, clearly, all mine to do. But I feel it keenly now, the books I would have written, the impact I could have made with my words, the way it would have felt to have that joy in larger slices than late nights or the handful of months between jobs when I would write all day, reveling.
If we lived in a country where childcare was subsidized, higher education was paid for, there was a guaranteed minimum income before and after retirement, including a robust social security system; if we lived in a country where health care wasn’t a for-profit scam to make insurance companies more money at the expense of providers and patients then, yes, we would all have more time, more ease, more financial security.
As Americans, we’ve voted to move in the opposite direction, to prioritize billionaires getting richer rather than the rest of us having our basic needs met, including children. Many other countries have made the political and policy decisions that free up the paychecks and mental energy for everyone who lives there. Just not the United States.
But right now, in this time and place, women can still advocate for themselves. Carve out time. For your work, your play, your art, whatever brings you life. Have the tough conversations about who does what and how well for the children and in the house.
The two biggest pitfalls I see in these conversations are when women don’t let go of the results and men feign incompetence. If you’re going to turn a task over to another adult, let them do it. Don’t ask someone to do the dishes and then complain about or – worse yet, redo – their loading of the dishwasher.
Men, don’t pretend you can’t adult. I’ve been listening to a song called “Labour” by Paris Paloma. She has this line “I know you’re a smart man and weaponize the false incompetence, it’s dominance under a guise.” Learned helplessness, weaponized incompetence, whatever name you use, any woman has seen this – the helpless male handwaving, tossing the proverbial task back into her lap, while looking for a gold star for pretending to help.
Consider the difference between the man who stops at the grocery store on the way home and buys what his wife asks for and the man who does meal planning, including all the lunches and snacks for everyone in the house, for the entire week, gets all the groceries, does meal prep and then makes the meals during the week.
Let’s say that ownership of all the tasks and mental labor associated with feeding a family was entirely off a woman’s plate. That would free up about 4-6 hours a week for most of us. Think of what you could do with that time! Write, nap, run, play, see friends. That would be 300 hours a year, almost two full weeks of time you could reclaim.
Over the years, O’Keeffe would spend less time at Lake George, traveling instead, and often ending up in New Mexico. She bought a house outside of Santa Fe because she loved the door of the house. It took her years to be able to buy the house and then remodel it. She painted pictures of the door over and over again. The museum has a photograph of her standing in the door. It is oddly square, the doorway wider than expected. But I see the appeal of the door. It is a door in a wall, a black door in a light adobe wall, an opening, an exit, a wider path to freedom or security or shelter. How many of us are trying, or have tried, to find the exit, the space to live our own lives, have our own air and time and silence.
To quote another verse from Paloma’s song; “You make me do too much labour, all day every day, therapist, mother, maid, nymph then virgin, nurse then a servant, just an appendage, live to attend him so that he never lifts a finger.”
Open the door. Find your Santa Fe. Take back your time.
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