Woman's Work

  Woman machinist, Douglas Aircraft Company, Long Beach, Calif. (LOC) 
  Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

My Spanish teacher makes fun of me because whenever I am in doubt about the gender of a word, I make it feminine.  We will be making up some sentence: "Nosotros tenemos mucho dinero."  ["We have a lot of money."]  And she will then say, "Oh, for Angela we must say "Nosotras tenemos mucho dinero."  My reply is always, “If I don't make the feminine the default gender, who will?”  Plus our Spanish book makes everything masculine. 

Yesterday we had a story entitled, “El trabajo de la mujer es muy facil.”  My teacher read the title and laughed.  She said, “Oh, Angela is going to love this one.”  The title was meant as a joke but the more you read the story, the more we all – three students and one teacher in a crowded but fairly quiet Ozzie’s in Park Slope – realize that the title is not as facetious as we want it to be.  The husband, who decided to go shopping for his wife to show her how easy her job is, walks away from his trip to la tienda thinking that shopping aka “woman’s work” is pretty easy.

The problem with the sexes comes up for me a lot but it is never as clear as in Spanish class.  There are many words that I can never remember because I think they should actually be feminine or vice versa.  Problema for example.  It ends with an “a”.  Why is it el problema and not la.  I could go on and on.    My teacher says that I just need to memorize it.  This is just how the language works.  But it’s a little hard to swallow that esposas means both wives and handcuffs and not ask why. 

I have been having a hard time lately with a man.  (Friends, don’t get excited.  It’s not romantic.)  He and I have constant friction and though we have had a lengthy conversation about resolving some of our issues, I always feel a little bit like because my energy is not as aggressive [read: “male” by his definition, not mine], that I am never working as hard as he is or as proficient as he is at what we’re doing. As much as this dynamic I have is frustrating, the thing that makes it even more frustrating is that it seems to tied to what others deem as typical “female” and “male” behavior.  I am only doing the best that I can when I am being extremely aggressive and stressed out but when I am not, I am being less effective –aka more female.  It’s completely bogus.

I have a real hard time with this kind of personality.  I immediately take on whatever aggression he throws my way. I am always in the wrong.  I am never doing enough.  As powerful as I am, I lose all of my power when I deal with a guy who has a personality like this.   How can this be the same person as the one in Spanish class?

Sure, we had a long conversation where I was pretty honest about my feelings.  I felt I was closer to the person I wanted/needed to be in this situation.  But it was hard/is hard.