On Governing: A Curious Little Hobby

I read, this morning, over a breakfast that took considerably longer to arrange than it ought to have — the kitchen, again, hadn't understood about the grapefruit — that two of our nation's representatives had sat down together and had a Conversation. About Balance. About how terribly, terribly hard it is to have both a Family and a Career, as though these were two ponies one was expected to ride at once around a very small ring, applauded by strangers.

I want to be fair to them, because Father always says fairness costs nothing, which is one of the only economical pieces of advice he has ever given anyone. So: fair. They sat. They discussed. Representative Leavitt and Representative Ocasio-Cortez, evidently from rather different corners of the room politically, found themselves in tender agreement that the juggling of Job and Home is, in fact, difficult. A rare bipartisan moment, I'm told, and everyone was very moved.

I was not moved. I was baffled, in the specific, ringing way I am baffled perhaps four or five times a day, always by the same essential shape of problem wearing a different coat. Because here is what I cannot get past, and I have turned it over and over the way one turns over a canapé one suspects, correctly, of containing walnut: these are two people who, by virtue of showing up to a large marble building and saying words in a chamber, are permitted to call what they do a "career." And apparently this career, this voluntary, opt-in, nobody-held-a-gun-to-anyone arrangement, generates a species of hardship so pressing it must be discussed. On television. With graphics.

One simply does not do the marble-building thing, if the marble-building thing is going to be so very difficult. This is not a complicated position. It has never once been explained to me why a person continues showing up to the place that is causing the difficulty. If the shoe pinches, the answer, surely, is not a symposium on the pinching. The answer is the shoe.

I understand — I am told, repeatedly, by people who seem to feel very strongly about it — that "having a job" is not, for most of the population, the leisure activity I am perhaps picturing. That people do it because of something called money, which they require in order to obtain food and shelter and the other little staples of existence, and that this requirement is not, for them, optional in the way it has never once been anything but optional for me. I do hear this. I nod along. And still, some small, genuinely uncomprehending part of me keeps circling back to Father, and to the door that has always simply been standing open in every room of my life, and I cannot, try as I might, picture the particular architecture of a life in which that door does not exist. It seems less like a hardship, when I picture it, and more like a fascinating oversight. Someone forgot to build the door. That does seem like the sort of thing one ought to mention to somebody.

The family part I find almost more mystifying than the career part, if I am honest, because family, at least in my experience, largely runs itself, provided one has adequately staffed it. One does not "balance" a family so much as one hires a person — several people, ideally, so there is redundancy, the way Father always insists on redundancy for anything load-bearing — and then the family proceeds, largely without incident, in the next room. I am given to understand that Representative Ocasio-Cortez and Representative Leavitt do not, in fact, have several people in the next room, and that this is somehow typical, and that this typical-ness is the entire substance of the difficulty being discussed, and — you know, I do try, I really do try to follow these things to their logical end — but I keep arriving at the same small, cheerful door. One simply asks. Someone. Anyone. There is always a someone.

What strikes me as the truly exotic ordeal here — and I say ordeal with the full weight of a woman who has never once carried a bag through an airport, so I use the word carefully, as an anthropologist might — is that these two people have voluntarily selected an occupation that is, structurally, almost designed to be difficult to combine with anything else. The hours. The travel. The strangers with clipboards. And rather than simply declining the marble building, the way one declines a party with a cash bar, they have gone ahead and taken the job, and now find themselves surprised — surprised! — that the job is jobbish. It is rather like complaining that the ocean is wet after one has, of one's own free will, swum out into it. The wetness was, I think, knowable in advance.

I don't say this unkindly. I want to be extremely clear that I am not remotely troubled by either of these two women as women — one gathers they are both, in their respective spheres, quite accomplished, and accomplishment, even of the grubby, clipboard-adjacent variety, deserves a certain baseline of respect, the way one respects a very committed hobbyist. It is the whole apparatus that exhausts me. The concept of "career," dragged out and discussed as though it were weather, as though everyone simply must have one, the way everyone simply must have weather. Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever sat me down and required that I have a career, and I have found this arrangement to suit me enormously, and I confess I struggle, weary two-stars and all, to locate the tragedy in an arrangement other people could presumably also simply... have. Ask. Arrange. There is always an ask available, is what I keep wanting to lean across the table and say, gently, the way one might tell a dinner guest, kindly, that there is in fact more wine, they need only signal the man.

The poors — and I include, in this instance, anyone whose calendar is dictated by a marble building rather than by their own inclination, which I recognize is a somewhat broader category than usual, and does technically sweep up two sitting members of Congress, but categories are categories, one mustn't be precious about it — the poors do have this recurring difficulty of believing the difficulty is the point, when the difficulty is so plainly optional. One does not have to have the career. One does not have to have the balancing act. One has only to have the door, and then to walk through it, the way I have walked through every door I have ever encountered, all my life, without once wondering whether it would open.

I don't know that I have a solution to offer Representative Leavitt or Representative Ocasio-Cortez, precisely, since I gather their particular door has not been built yet, and building doors is, I'm told, a whole legislative undertaking of its own, tediously slow, full of committees. But I did want it on the record, as it were, that from where I sit — which is, admittedly, a rather better seat than most, upholstered, private, no clipboard in sight — the entire dilemma has the faint, sweet whiff of a problem that simply hasn't asked the right person yet. Somewhere, always, there is a Father. One need only find him.

Toodles, and do give my best to the poors — bless them, every one, so terribly busy.