The dangers of nebulous guilt (or why Lady Macbeth went mad)
My husband is not a monster, or even a chauvinist. He’s a very busy, kind man who cares deeply about his family and his values. If I wasn’t so tired I wouldn’t interpret his complaints about finding mouldy strawberries at the back of the fridge as a personal attack. I wouldn’t be feeling terrible because my son has a cold and I wasn’t home this weekend to make him smoothies (he won’t drink Innocent ones because mine, he says, are nicer). I wouldn’t have spent yesterday afternoon, which was fine and sunny, on making the ultimate Doctor Who mix on 8tracks. I’d have been out weeding the garden and doing myself good. Now it’s pouring down, I feel like shit and the weeds and rotting apples are still there to reproach me.
I would be using my time efficiently. I’d be rising at 5am to do my coursework, as I did several times over the last two weeks - as a result when I got to Stratford I was sleeping 10 hours a night and my presentation could have been so much better if I’d managed to keep that down to 8 and write it all out on index cards. Actually, I tried to use my time efficiently last week before I left. As soon as the organic veg box arrived I wrote down detailed menus for the week and left them in what I thought was a prominent place, I made soup for my friend’s birthday lunch and I put it in the freezer. Unfortunately, with the best of intentions to purge the freezer and avoid waste, while I was away my husband defrosted and ate the soup.
I agree with everything my husband says about the carbon footprint, the undesirability of eating red meat to excess…it’s just that sometimes my good intentions do not match my energy levels, physically or mentally. I really did mean to make those strawberries into a smoothie, and I was going to do it with juice extracted from our own home-grown fruit. It’s nicer that way and we really shouldn’t waste the pears.
And all this would be so much easier to do than writing my essay on Othello, or researching Essay Two, which is due in just two weeks after Essay One, on the subject of female madness in Shakespeare’s plays, and how it frees the characters to say transgressive things (If you don’t believe me, think of Ophelia). I would reach a point where I could say “queer theory” in public without feeling I’m insulting somebody, I would know my Juliet Dusinbirre from my Coppelia Kahn and be able to explain in five minutes how Desdemona was short-changed by the editor of the 2nd Arden Edition of Othello in 1958. It’s all in there somewhere, if I can only clear the smoothies out of the way and get at it.
I think so many of the arguments between men and women occur because men don’t have our tendency to feel nebulous guilt. As my DH pointed out this morning, most of the projects he is involved with at work will ultimately fail, that’s just in the nature of things and he’ll be able to discuss the reasons why dispassionately and learn from them. But I am now so primed with self-reproach that any attempt to suggest a more efficient way I could be doing things is like holding a match to an unexploded bomb. I feel bad about that. Of course I do. I’m a woman.
I would be using my time efficiently. I’d be rising at 5am to do my coursework, as I did several times over the last two weeks - as a result when I got to Stratford I was sleeping 10 hours a night and my presentation could have been so much better if I’d managed to keep that down to 8 and write it all out on index cards. Actually, I tried to use my time efficiently last week before I left. As soon as the organic veg box arrived I wrote down detailed menus for the week and left them in what I thought was a prominent place, I made soup for my friend’s birthday lunch and I put it in the freezer. Unfortunately, with the best of intentions to purge the freezer and avoid waste, while I was away my husband defrosted and ate the soup.
I agree with everything my husband says about the carbon footprint, the undesirability of eating red meat to excess…it’s just that sometimes my good intentions do not match my energy levels, physically or mentally. I really did mean to make those strawberries into a smoothie, and I was going to do it with juice extracted from our own home-grown fruit. It’s nicer that way and we really shouldn’t waste the pears.
And all this would be so much easier to do than writing my essay on Othello, or researching Essay Two, which is due in just two weeks after Essay One, on the subject of female madness in Shakespeare’s plays, and how it frees the characters to say transgressive things (If you don’t believe me, think of Ophelia). I would reach a point where I could say “queer theory” in public without feeling I’m insulting somebody, I would know my Juliet Dusinbirre from my Coppelia Kahn and be able to explain in five minutes how Desdemona was short-changed by the editor of the 2nd Arden Edition of Othello in 1958. It’s all in there somewhere, if I can only clear the smoothies out of the way and get at it.
I think so many of the arguments between men and women occur because men don’t have our tendency to feel nebulous guilt. As my DH pointed out this morning, most of the projects he is involved with at work will ultimately fail, that’s just in the nature of things and he’ll be able to discuss the reasons why dispassionately and learn from them. But I am now so primed with self-reproach that any attempt to suggest a more efficient way I could be doing things is like holding a match to an unexploded bomb. I feel bad about that. Of course I do. I’m a woman.