What’s a little motor oil to a self-sufficient lass, right?
I noticed, as I read the book I wrote about last week, Your Money or Your Life, that something jumped off the page at me in that sort of itchy, uncomfortable, tenacious way that Things I Should Pay Attention To seem to have. You know, like the reading equivalent of a scratchy wool sweater, which turns your skin pink and itchy no matter what you do, as you go about your day?
The book calls into question an “unspoken assumption” about fixing cars, namely that “if you are a woman you do not and cannot fix your own car.’”
I had a funny feeling, while reading those words, that they might be talking not just about cars but about money as well. Not that there aren’t many, many women out there who are very good at dealing with money. But I’ve thought for some time now that if I had a daughter I’d want her to learn a martial art, just so she'd have a back-up against any old ideas about not being able to protect herself.
And in a way, knowing how to handle money is as much about protecting yourself as learning a martial art.
I was surprised to even have that thought – the one about there also being an old unspoken assumption that women don’t or can’t deal with money.
I mean – what?? I’ve always been able to support myself just fine, thank you very much. And I was brought up in a family where we girls chopped wood and hammered nails and dug ditches (quite a lot of wood and nails and ditches, actually, as we acted out my dad’s dream of building a “homestead” in the wilds of Oregon). And my brothers all did dishes and cooked. One of my brothers, I’m proud to say, is an incredibly strong mountain climber who sews his own climbing gear. On a sewing machine.
Still, there was that thought, hanging on me like an itchy sweater while I tried to pretend it wasn’t there.
I thought, first, that I’d tackle the more literal idea, the one about fixing cars. So I started the week by checking and filling the oil on my car myself, for the first time ever (well, at least since I was a teenager and my dad tried to teach me how).
This was scary because I’ve always wanted to know as little about cars as possible. My relationship with cars, come to think of it, has been a lot like my relationship with money. I’ve always wanted both to be sort of “seen and not heard.” That is, so reliable that I never have to think about them.
So, after twenty-four hours of feeling proud that I’d taken a small step toward learning to do basic stuff for my car, I thought, “You know what else has an edge of fear? How about having a really frank conversation with my boyfriend about money?”
And – I froze.
Believe it or not, I still haven’t started to talk to him about it. Instead, I’ve been having a conversation with myself about it for most of the week. The conversation (in abridged form) has gone something like this:
Q: “How about writing him an email now?”
A: “Do I really have to have this conversation with him? What about the mystery, what about the romance, what about reading Neruda’s love poems and writing each other haiku?”
Q: “Who are you, Cinderella?”
That’s right, Cinderella. Did all my parent’s work, to make sure I knew I could do anything my brothers could do, fail? Am I some 1970’s-born, feminist-raised, Barbie- and TV-abstaining version of “Cinderella Ate my Daughter?”
I’ve always had decent earning power, luckily. But the more I think about this Cinderella question, the more I notice that while earning power has its perks, it’s never been something I got particularly excited about. So (cold hard truth here) – is there some part of me that thinks being able to make a living is handy but would still love to have a wonderful man come along and say, “Hey, that’s a heavy burden you’re carrying all by yourself. How about if I take care of it?”
Or is it maybe just that I long for a world in which the poetic, mysterious side of life counts as much as that thing called “making a living?”
I love how the world can be so literal sometimes: On the very morning that I started to wonder about all of this, I was struggling to light a fire. The wood was wet, and I tried to start it several times before it finally got dry enough to stay lit.
So I was spending a lot of time blowing on the embers, that morning as I pondered Cinderella. And when I saw myself later in the mirror, there were ashes stuck in my eyelashes, in my hair.
Come to think of it, Cinderella did get swept away by that prince. But she was a hard worker too. And I’m guessing it took some courage to sit there amongst the ashes – which, in a way, could be a good metaphor for sitting with the realities we’d prefer not to see in ourselves.
I wondered, this week, if I should be doing a different “thing that scared me” each day, or if I should just stay with these questions. I decided that sitting amongst the ashes was enough. And I have the ashes in my hair – in the form of this somewhat embarrassing story – to show for it.
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