Women's Work: A Reckoning With Work and Home by Megan K. Stack

Author:Megan K. Stack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: memoirs, parenting
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2019-04-02T04:00:00+00:00

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We were visiting the ruins of a Mughal fort near our house when I had a crotch rubbed against my ass. I was standing in line to buy tickets. It was a Sunday afternoon. Max was at my hip, and Tom paced in the grass with Patrick.

The dick was hard, and looking for purchase. I put my hand on the shoulder of my toddler and turned to face the man behind me. I looked into his eyes. He looked back. He was skinny and poor; his wrists poked from his sleeves.

“Back up,” I said, and he did. He dropped his eyes to the ground, and his friends laughed and jostled at his elbows, and then it was over. I forgot within five minutes.

That night in bed, the memory slipped across my mind, and I mentioned it to Tom.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he cried. “I can’t believe—it’s so outrageous. You should have told me!”

“Why?” I said.

“I handled it,” I said.

“I should tell you so you can get beaten up in front of our kids?” I said.

He stewed and muttered and smacked at his own face until finally I erupted.

“What does it matter? Don’t you know how many times, in how many countries? Why is it important to you? You don’t remember I’m a woman? You haven’t noticed there are almost no women on the streets of Delhi? Look at the bus stops. Look at the sidewalks. There are no women!”

“Of course, I know,” he said. “It’s terrible.”

But then he looked at me as if that had nothing to do with me. And in a sense he was right, because I was a white foreign woman, but also he was wrong, because there always arrives a moment when you are still a woman, no matter what kind of woman you are. I couldn’t believe I was still invisible to my husband in this big, basic way. The failure to see what was in front of him; the failure to imagine the rest.

I’d been shocked at the divergence of our fates after we became parents, but in truth, the gender discrepancy between us had started long before that. I’d experienced sexual harassment in countless cultural forms while Tom wandered unscathed. He inevitably felt compelled to intervene manfully when he happened to be present, but otherwise he was largely oblivious. I seldom called his attention to these experiences because I didn’t want them to stick around as memories between us. And we were always so busy, and it was always easier not to think about it, because thinking about it drove me into what felt like an unproductive rage.

But now it all slid through my mind: The years of come-ons from sources and colleagues. The news organizations I’d roped off in my mind as no-gos because I’d sexually rejected some man who’d since become powerful, and didn’t want to risk getting undercut and blackballed. The times I thought I was about to get raped. All the things that

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