Kelly C. George, Ph.D.: 0:00
So I want to talk about bathrooms and mothers and work. And notice right away that if the topic of my conversation were bathrooms and fathers and work, you might be a little bit more confused about where I was going with this. But if you're keeping up with the news lately, you might have noticed a pattern, which is that apparently lots of us moms are hiding in our bathrooms. Some of us are going there to do our work. Some of us are going there to eat cookies in silence from our children. And, of course, if you're a reader, you can't help but think how devastating it is that suddenly the "room of our own" that Virginia Woolf talked about and longed for has become the bathroom. The New York Times has had several awesome essays in their parenting section during this time, one of which was headlined "When Mom's Zoom Meeting is the One That Has to Wait." And, of course, part of what it is about is the wage gap. If you're in a heterosexual couple, the man is more likely, although not always, he is more likely to make more money, and at a time of economic constriction and hardship and uncertainty it is the primary wage earner's zoom meeting that must take precedence. This is not any of our individual faults, of course. That's exactly what the article attempts to show us. And so, ah, 100 years on from Virginia Woolf writing about how important it is for us to be able to close our door to feel safe inside that space, to feel free from interruptions, all this time later, the New York Times prints a photograph of a psychotherapist conducting her meeting with clients from her bathroom. Now, granted, it's a posh bathroom in Los Angeles, it's really, looks quite lovely, but... [pause] and maybe that's actually what makes it even more mind boggling, right? That this distinction can be felt all the way up the line, that even in our privilege, we can feel this being relegated to the bathroom. Or maybe, and I don't discount this at all. Maybe it's merely, as many have said before, that this is the only hurt we are able to record because we are so privileged. And so perhaps in other communities this simply would not even register because we are more concerned with feeding ourselves, we are more concerned with, not just eminent unemployment, but current unemployment. So that photo of the woman in the posh bathroom, of course, I couldn't help but read it both ways. There's another time when we find ourselves in the bathroom, and that's what I said before, it's when we eat in the bathroom. Again, this just doesn't seem right to me. Another of The New York Times recent parenting articles tells me that eating a cookie in the bathroom so my kids can't see it is part of appropriate self care during this moment, and I couldn't agree more. It certainly is. And in fact, a friend advised me that she keeps peanut butter cups in the bathroom for those times when she locks herself in to be away from the kids. And I just don't know if this is part of the geography of our homes. We haven't figured out how to put locks on other doors other than the bathroom. Why should it be that we are to find our only private space in the same space where we do the very most intimate tasks in terms of our bodily care, that is the only space often that we're allowed. And I know, I mean, I'm struggling to make an issue of this because it seems so minor right now. It really does in light of other people's problems. And I really do wonder if this would be a problem that registered if I were speaking from a more vulnerable position. I don't know if it matters enough to matter, but it does feel like if the only place I could go to eat a cookie or write a sentence is my bathroom, at the very least, it feels like maybe we should be standing up for ourselves a little more.