It’s a funny thing. Patience has always been a woman’s lot in life: waiting for children to learn better, waiting for warriors to come home. Waiting for bread to bake, for clothes to dry, for plants to sprout. That makes it all sound like a passive thing, but along with that patience had to go the determination to do the work that had to be done (again and again and again). To teach the children, over and over if necessary; to run the home, the farm or the business while the warriors were away; to bake the bread every week; to do the laundry that would just get soiled again, to hoe and sow, weed and reap.
Times changed, but the need for those traits remained, though less confined to women: children still learn in the same way, and now there’s waiting for laundry to finish, the that must be done only to be undone again, and all the waiting and small tasks all of our jobs entail.
I was thinking about it, because of the things that have forced me to learn the sort of patience that gets a tedious job finished, some are so traditional, and the others so…. not. The traditional ones are crafts, mostly. When I was a girl I started projects but rarely finished any thtat took longer than an afternoon. It was a bit of a surprise, in my twenties, when I finished a few cross-stitch pieces – even though I deliberately chose sparse designes with words or lines that took much less stitching than elaborate shaded designs, any needlepoint project is a big committment. It drove me crazy not to be able to read while I stitched, though. I understand entirely why descriptions of women stitching together, whether mending or doing fine embroidery, so often include one reading to the others, or at least a fair bit of conversation. I learned to knit because it is possible to read while doing it; since then I’ve finished not only scarves and hats, but also sweaters, socks, and bags. I’m more into having a finished item than I am a ‘process’ knitter, and somewhere in the middle of a sweater, there’s just a point where you grit your teeth and promise yourself it will get done, eventually. You remember the things you’ve ocmpeted before, and maybe you put in a marker to make progress easier to see so it doesn’t feel so much like nothing is happening.
In fact, it’s exactly like erging. When you’re on the rowing machine and you need to crank out 10 km, sometimes nothing but sheer bloody-minded determination gets you through those long middle kilometers. You play games with fractions: “now I’m one third done – now I’m 36/100 done, so that’s 18/50 or 9/25 – now I’m 45/100 so divide by 5 and it’s 9/20 – now I’m over half done! come on self, it’s all downhill from here and you know you can always do the last half” and so on, meter by meter. A lot like knitting, in fact, only with more sweat and a less tangible finished product.
The same endurance skills are useful at work, of course, and in relationships and so on; it’s just a bit less visible. I do sometimes get the feeling, in the middle of an erg piece, when I start thinking that this is coming to me from the foremother who went out in the snow to milk all three cows for the second time that day, or the one whose hungry family left had her kneading bread twice a week, every week – until they were grown and gone and she kept baking the extra bread for the grandchildren. Or the one who patiently helped her child learn to read, in the days before anyone had ever heard of a learning disability, so he could stay in the class with his friends. Knitting myself a sweater or training for rowing isn’t quite on the level of those things, but I think it’s good to keep their legacy in practice.
On a totally different subject, I suspect my ancestresses were capable of outrage too, when times merited, and that’s anothing thing that hasn’t changed. A couple of political notes, because I can’t keep quiet on these. How horrible would it be, if someone you loved were one of the 10-20 people killed by a bomb in Afghanistan, to find out that the news report of the bombing boiled down to, “Don’t worry everyone, it’s all right! Cheney wasn’t even scratched!”
Second, courtesy of Jonquil comes the link to this, about the conditions under which whole families trying to enter the US are detained – including families seeking asylum via legitimate channels. I would really greatly prefer to read Dickens and Hardy as historical documents, not depictions of breaking news.
I rather have news fatigue myself right now.
For me the tediousness and sheer galling grit needed to do the same work over and over and over is tried severely not by the work itself, but how QUICKLY my work is undone. Especially cleaning. There have been far too times when a half day’s work is ruined in minutes. And that, my friend, is where the fortitude comes in. Not to bust some heads takes every bit of patience and courage I own. ~LA
Both patience and multi-tasking come from the same source — waiting for something to finish. And the need to occupy one’s brain when the task at hand doesn’t really require it. I was pretty good at finishing embroidery and knitting projects before I was married, but I really got into it after the kids were born. I even learned how to crochet because you can only drop one stitch at at time — kids! But you can teach children with your brain and your mouth while keeping your hands busy. It’s no wonder that women do these things automatically while men say that multi-tasking is impossible.