On the Bra Straps of Giants

I should be sleeping.

For over 2.5 decades I’ve been praying on this. Whether it be because of work, or child rearing, or anxiety consequent to either or both, my mind doesn’t follow the rules as well as the rest of me has.

But I played by the rules even as they were changing.

I had a career, or a dozen, and some kids, which were not but felt like a dozen, and I teetered on heels bringing home the (kosher) bacon, frying it up in a pan.

I hosted weekly Shabbat Thanksgiving feasts and was a one woman catering company every September. All this, while squeezing in work days and getting paid less than the boys who didn’t have to think about the price of corned beef or when to stuff the cabbages, or take the kids for haircuts.

It wasn’t just my Generation – the irrepressible and irrelevant Generation X – who were the test cases for second wave feminism aka We Drank the Enjoli. It was also our mothers, who held jobs and handed out latch keys, but didn’t know they had to carry the guilt (which was our albatross.) Our grandmothers, at least mine, worked until she was almost 90. By that time it was volunteer, but her identity was shaped by service to her family and community.

And now, these young, bright, ambitious females are entering the workplace with righteous anger about how unfair the workforce is to women.

Wait. What?

Excuse me, you, who thinks Oops I Did it Again signaled the feminist revolution and now waltzed into the boardroom, Blahniks or Birkinstocks, outraged at inequality and discrimination you have never and probably will never experience in your lifetime.

You have maternity leave, preferential hiring, unified anti-mysogynist watchdogs, and advances in equal pay and family time. I can get behind that progress. Yet. You demand time off to have your hair done for a very important meeting (Yes, that’s the exact thing keeping me up. Petty? No. Illustrative. You bet.) And you complain about inequality that is vanishing as the words leave your lacquered, filled, lips.

Is this what we put the thankless years in for? For rootless entitlement? For unnecessary vanity? For the undoing of our breathless race to the finish line regardless of the unequal demands life extracted from us? We put our everything into performing as equals – not models or objects or high maintenance princesses. Just people.

If you’ve ever put on makeup at the traffic light or given the A train a glimpse of your mascara application eye gymnastics, you are my people.

Yeah, we have deep trenches on our shoulders from where the bra straps etched like the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. In the striation, you might catch the toe of your lovely Louboutin as you perch on my shoulder mistaking me for a barstool or other inanimate ass supporter.

Sounds resentful and bitter, but I do wish you well. Not for you so much as for us: those of us who, faced with the reality of the equity we deserved and demanded, had painful choices to make, ones you will never know. Whether we decided to fold our own education into a square and store it in our pockets while we provided traditional at home support for the family, facing confusion from those who wondered why we bothered, or for those out on the front lines being reminded they could try it all but never really have it all, it was we who forged the path, burned bras, protested, demonstrated, failed, persevered, and opened the doors you think you spent some imagined childhood constructing.

So take a closer look. What part did you play? How are you reaping the rewards? And who should you go and thank?

I’m going to sleep.