I Want to Know How She Does It

I have this neighbor who is really good at all things domestic. She’s not bitchy or judgmental. (Witch.) Her house practically sparkles. (Hmph!) She is animated and creative with children, and she always seems to be freshly showered and dressed. Even the backseat of her car is clean.

I suspect when her son says, “Mommy, play with me,” she doesn’t shush him away so she can finish her blog post. In fact, she doesn’t have a blog, further proof that she is utterly selfless.

I find myself thinking, “I don’t know how she does it.”

And then I think, “Isn’t there a book by that title?”

Why, yes. Yes there is, by Allison Pearson, circa 2002. And since I’m aware that despite our 21st century existence, many people still believe women “like”—were, in fact, made for—wiping poop from small plump asses and mopping the kitchen floor and doing the thirteenth load of laundry in a week—simply by virtue of possessing a vagina (which, I will say again, is a wicked miracle of an organ), then I think it’s quite appropriate that the next Maladjusted Book Club selection is a humorous book about the nature of juggling motherhood and work in this post-feminist, feminist-backlash of an era. Don’t you think?

Besides, I know many of you have been mumbling, “Come on with the deep books. Can’t we read something fun? I’d join your club if you weren’t such a party-pooper with the 19th century French literature and that long and drawn out symposium crap.”

Well this “Mommy-Lit” (because surely anything John Updike wrote was labeled “Daddy-Lit”) is about as light as I get, people. There will be no Jennifer Weiner here. Deal with it. And, SURPRISE! I haven’t read but a few pages of this one, so I’ll be just as shocked and appalled by the things the narrator, Kate Reddy, Working Mother, does to show that she can manage it all: work, home, sex, play, cooking, pretend-cooking, cat-napping after midnight, and, I assume, occasional showering.

I think we will have a fabulous discussion. Don’t you?

Set your calendars for Monday, March 14th.

Tell me you’re in. (You can lie if you have to. I think Kate Reddy would like that.)

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Tagged as: Allison Pearson, I Don't Know How She Does It, post-feminism