emmagrant01 | Passing this on. (Reply)

gmth's LJ, and I just had to add "You go, Jo!" to the sentiments.

This bit was particularly interesting to me:

After the award ceremony I bumped into a woman I hadn't seen for nearly three years. The first thing she said to me? 'You've lost a lot of weight since the last time I saw you!'

'Well,' I said, slightly nonplussed, 'the last time you saw me I'd just had a baby.'

What I felt like saying was, 'I've produced my third child and my sixth novel since I last saw you. Aren't either of those things more important, more interesting, than my size?' But no – my waist looked smaller! Forget the kid and the book: finally, something to celebrate!

Oh man, if I had a frickin' dollar for every time something like that's happened to me. I'm married to an executive, so I occasionally have to do the executive wife thing and have dinner with someone important (ususally extremely rich and always male) and his wife, and oh, man. No one ever asks me what I do. Never. MDH used to bring it up as a point of conversation, but I asked him to stop because it seemed to make everyone at the table uncomfortable.

So the conversation turns inevitably to children (because for many women, this is considered a safe topic to talk about with another woman), and I then have to answer a bunch of questions about why I don't have any. I used to just change the subject, but I've found it remarkably effective to go into great detail about my infertility issues and all of the procedures I've been through in an attempt to get pregnant. That's not the sort of thing I would usually share with a stranger, but it's the only thing I usually have in common with those women. It makes me a sympathetic (or pathetic, maybe) figure to them, and it seems to grease the wheels of conversation. We do that faux-bonding thing over dinner, and it's less uncomfortable than the alternative.

It's interesting, but I always come away from those things feeling horribly inadequate. I'm invariably the fattest woman in the room (they all have hours a day to exercise), the only one with no make-up on, the one wearing an outfit I got on sale at the mall rather than a designer dress, the only one who hasn't had a boob job or botox or both, the only liberal, and far too often, the only woman with a career of my own.

I don't mean to insult women who don't have careers, btw. In the case of those women I'm talking about, I'm sure their husbands are gone a lot and someone needed to anchor that family by staying at home. Serving your family is very noble and necessary, of course, and for people who want to do it, it's great that they have the opportunity, because not all women who would like to do that do. I also believe that the women who don't choose to stay home should not be made to feel like bad mothers and wives because of it. Basically, I'm just saying that it's weird to be such an outlier in that particular group, and to feel like I'm be judged on all of the wrong things -- what I look like instead of who I really am.

On the other hand, who I really am is a porn-writing math geek, so maybe that's a good thing. ;-)

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