In my recent review of Simone St. James’s The Broken Girls, I talked about women’s ability to carry on despite tragedy. And that reminded me of a book that made me so mad, I couldn’t get more than a couple of chapters into it.
In Pre-Pandemic times, I was part of an informal book club of former coworkers that met once a month. For the most part, we didn’t read the same book. The rule was generally, as long as you read something, that was fine. And, really, it was a chance for us all to catch up. But for Christmas one of the book club members, who was the one who kept us all on task, gifted me a book. I don’t actually remember the name and I’ve since passed it on to someone else who I thought might appreciate it better. It was something like The View from Provence.
The premise of the book was a woman whose husband had tragically died more than a year previous was struggling to get her life back together. Her mother owned a small house in Provence, France which needed some looking after. Although I didn’t get to this part, it was obvious that this woman was going to be sent there and while fixing up the house, she was going to fall in love with the boy next door who she’d had a crush on as a youth.
The problem is, this woman was a mess. More than a year after her husband’s death and she had trouble getting anywhere on time. She forgot orders for her bakery. She forgot the speech she wrote for her sister’s wedding. And that might not have bothered me so much, except that she had a child. I think he was 6 or 7. He’d taken to wearing a watch so that he could keep her on time. He was trying to pick up the slack for his mother who after a full twelve months of grieving her husband, still couldn’t manage to get herself together.
And that bothered me. A lot. I think if there hadn’t been a kid involved, I could have rolled my eyes but continued the book. With a kid in the mix, though. I just couldn’t stop thinking about all the psychological harm this woman was doing to her kid.
But that brings me back to the point I made in my The Broken Girls review. Women are expected to pick themselves back up and just keep going. To not let the tragedy slow them down or knock them out of the race. We have to persevere. And we have to do it quickly. There are no Miss Havisham’s anymore sitting in our wedding dress in a house going to ruin. If your husband dies, there’s a very short window where you are allowed to be a mess. A couple of weeks, maybe a month. People will pitch in to help pick up the slack for that time. But after that, you better pull yourself together.
And I can’t help but feel that’s, in some way, a product of our patriarchal society. I wonder if I would feel the same way if it was a dad who was a mess after his wife’s death. I’m not sure. Men are certainly allowed more latitude on family things. I was listening to a podcast where they played a clip of Fox’s Tucker Carlson talking about his family. He mentioned that he’d changed very few diapers and then went on to say something transphobic. The two male hosts of the podcast picked up on the transphobia but not the other. We somehow allow for men not to be primary caregivers.
What do you think? Should women be expected to pull themselves together after a tragedy? Do we treat men differently under the same circumstances? And if not, why is that?
