First, Do Nothing.

I thought about going to yoga class.
I considered going to church.
Said Husband was outside sanding and painting the boards for much-needed book cases. I thought about helping him. Or taking the sander the old bureau that needs to be redone.
I need to write a letter to my friend who is ill, and send a thank you card to the woman who took me to lunch last week. I thought about doing those things. Or working on the text for my website.
I turned on the classic movie channel, thinking I might catch an old flick. Gene Kelly didn’t move me. Neither did I Love Lucy. Neither did Rachel Ray.
I acquired Obama’s biography. Considered reading that.

What I did instead was to lie down on the narrow couch in my room, pull a cotton spread up to my shoulders and allow myself to lie there until I fell asleep. I slept for a couple of hours until my child came in from play, squealing and chattering, and my husband finished his task, thumping things back into the closets. I got up long enough to quiet them. And then…I lay down again. I went back to sleep.

Okay, that was extreme. Oh, but I needed it! And there is something to be said for moments of silence, of quiet, of rest.

My days often begin at 7 a.m., and frequently end at one or two the next morning. I am famous among my friends for catching a few winks in the afternoon. (Still clinging to the idea that when baby sleeps, mommy should sleep—though “baby” is now four and hardly willing to nap herself.) But those naps are strategic. I figure that if I allow myself to sleep a while during the day, I’ll be able to stay up later in the evening to “get things done.”

The focus is always on getting things done. How many tasks can I accomplish in a day? How many tasks can I accomplish at one time? And I’m not the most "accomplished" among the folks I know. Many of my women friends work nearly constantly. Two jobs, some of them. A job and kids. Kids and elderly parents. A job and an all-consuming pastime. We turn our hobbies, our exercise regimens, even our social activities into tasks by which we evaluate our level of accomplishment.

For many of us, the very idea of stopping. For a minute. To rest. To catch our breath. To think. That is—well—unthinkable.

I wonder why? I think some of it comes from living in society that tells us we have to do more and more—and gives us the technology to be doing something constantly. But I think that, for some of us (okay, for me), there is a deeper need to prove ourselves. To prove that we can do everything and be everything. To fend off any criticism for our imperfections by being able to say, “But look at how hard I’m working….” To convince ourselves that we are good enough.

Doing—and being able to exhibit the fruit of our doing-ness—gives us a sense of power and control. But we forget that our source of power does not come from what we do. It comes from who we are. Before we do anything, we are powerful. Who wields more power than a newborn infant who can’t even raise her head? Who wields more power than the patient lying in a coma? All our energy, our thoughts, our decisions, our time, our attention is drawn to this one who can “do” nothing. That should tell us something.

Periodically, I will myself to do nothing. To let the e-mail pile up; to let the phone ring. To stop thinking, thinking, thinking about the next task I “need” to do. Once in a while I give myself permission to let things—and people—wait. I recall the phrase, “Cease striving and know.” And I do nothing.

It feels powerful.

Plan B(itch)

Yve’s husband called her a bitch.

Well, he didn’t actually call her that. He programmed her phone number into his cell under the b-word. Instead. Of. Her. Name.

Look, I’ve watched the TV show “Girlfriends” enough to know that some people apparently use the b-word as a term of affection. I understand that it has come to fall in the same category of code-switching as the “n-word” among African-Americans. I know that there are academic dialogues taking place about the appropriateness of the use of “taboo” words and language in helping a social group retain a sense of group identity and belonging, and to mark “their rights and obligations relative to others in the conversational setting.”

Blah, blah, blah. Whatever.

I also know that using “bitch” or “nigger”—depending on who you are and what your intention—is tantamount to abuse or a hate crime.

And that’s an important point. But it’s not my point here.

My question is: What is Yve going to do about it? What can she do? What is she willing to do? And how do her circumstances affect her response?

She, like a number of women I know (many who don’t work outside the home and a few who do), lives a lifestyle that relies on Husband's presence and his paycheck. Like many of us, she doesn’t have much of a safety net of her own. She is, at least to some degree, dependent.

Unless you have a strong sense of personal power, not having a sense that you have a safety net (even if it's as simple as "I can always go home to Mama.") can make your lines-that-must-not-be-crossed quite blurry. You can find yourself compromising values that you might otherwise hold firm.

I just read a compelling quote from Retrouvaille.org:

"If you are not free to reject, you cannot accept."

How do we get to the place—within ourselves and within our circumstances—that we are as free to reject as we are to accept?

It doesn’t matter to me how Yve finally addresses this with her man, as long as she's satisfied with her decision. I love her, I respect her choices and I know better than to try to tell even my best friends what to do within their own marriages. He’s her husband, for better or worse. They have children. And, it takes two, so she certainly carries some blame in her relationship's breakdown as well. That makes it complex. Even if she had a million-dollar trust fund and a private hideaway on St. Kitts, there would be no easy answers. But what I wish for Yve—and for all of us—is the ability to make hard choices from a position of strength.

Which ‘08 is this?

Time check: 10:19 a.m. July 22, 2008.

2008.

That's 88 years after women earned the right to vote. 40 years after the first bra burning. 48 years after Father Knows Best went off the air. A month after the first really, truly viable female Presidential candidate conceded.

Why, in 2008, would there be any need for a blog for women who don’t have a Plan B? I don’t mean the abortion pill. I mean an escape route, a parachute, an emergency exit, a safety net. We’re smart. We know better. Right? Right? But I keep hearing these stories.

• The husband who makes an expensive purchase—a sports car, a motorcycle, expensive electronic equipment—finances and family needs be damned.
• The guy who makes a major career decision—one that affects the whole family—without talking to his wife.
• The working mom whose husband tells her that, if they ever split up, the court will give him the kids because she’s never around anyway.
• The guy who withholds grocery money and hides the children’s passports so his wife can’t visit her family in Canada.

Okay, only one of these is potentially an actual crime. (The Canadian wife was found in a puddle of rainwater last week. Dead.) But all of these stories say something about the balance of power in these relationships. It points to the fact that a lot of us—I’m including myself here—are in situations where, if a partner decided to subtly or overtly pull rank, we wouldn’t really have much leverage or recourse.

I’m the last woman in the world who thought she’d be thinking about it this kind of thing. But here I am, an at-home mother of a toddler, whose nest egg disappeared into the down payment on the house, whose job disappeared when we moved away from Manhattan, who depends on a husband for health insurance. (All of this was done voluntarily on my part, I must emphasize.) Thankfully, Said Husband goes to work, comes home with his check and isn't hiding any grocery money.

But if he did? What’s my plan? What’s yours?