The Family Business
Every little girl grows up being taught how to run the family business. From taking care of siblings, to cooking, cleaning, and regulating everyone and everything around them, including themselves. Don’t wear the wrong thing or people see you as a slut. Don’t say the wrong thing or people will hear you as loud and ignorant. Get just enough of an education so you’re not a bimbo, but not too much or else you’re a know it all. The purpose of learning how to run the family business? To lure in a man that will love you, protect you, and provide for you. With so many women starting to love, protect, and provide for themselves, we find ourselves at a crossroads with the opposite sex. The men in this city want the traditional woman without having to provide the duties of the traditional man. While little girls everywhere are still being groomed to be the COO’s, boys everywhere are missing their lessons in being the CEO; in oil changing, house repairs, and romance, i.e., what it means to be the provider and protector. Men still have all the toxicity of the 50s, with none of the life skills. Like, they’re still punching holes in the drywall, only now they don’t know how to fix it.
Ladies’ night at the K with some girlfriends proved to be what every ladies’ night consists of; booze and boys. Marie was ready to spend a stack of cash she’d taken from her and her husband’s safe. It was day 5 of an apparent neverending bender for him, and apparently, he hadn’t been home. Sometime in the last almost 20 years of running her family business, cooking, cleaning, and raising four children, he had gotten it in his head that she was a cheater, didn’t have shit, wasn’t going to be shit, and that she could eat shit. Yet, in an effort to save her marriage, she lets him rage and binge, hoping that he will soon come to his senses and come home. With the beginning of it happening 5 days ago, it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel this time. Even though for the most part he had been the perfect husband, in the last 5 years or so, almost all of the good has turned into bad. Is this what we all have waiting for us? Decades of playing gender roles only for us to ultimately have to rely on ourselves at the end of the day? What is the point of putting up with someone’s bullshit, when you can build a life with someone for 20 years, and at the end you’re forced to either compromise your self-respect, or go it alone.
Is this because we choose to ignore red flags because we’re raised to feel like our ultimate value as a woman comes from how well we “fix” and run the family business, or because women are the only ones still held to the gender role expectation? When did CEO and COO become one, and why did it fall on the woman? We now do the cooking, cleaning, raising of the children, the oil changes, the taking out of the trash, and the paying of the bills. How did we fall into this cycle, and how can we get ourselves out? Even though I sat there realizing that another one of society’s problems was rooted in capitalism; when it came to Marie, I knew that just like Miley Cyrus, she could buy her own flowers, write her name in the sand, take herself dancing, and hold her own hand. Most importantly,
she could love herself better, than he can.
But should she have to?
