Call Abuse, Abuse

After an article entitled, Why I Will Never Live on Another Man’s Dime, a popular blog site wrote that they were looking for more inspiring stories about moving on post-split. 

Though I honor the author's courage and determination, and all women who rise in a culture that is stacked against them, I felt more angry after reading this article, than inspired. Angry at a culture that thinks that a mother struggling for her two cents, not knowing how to pay for her rent is an inspirational story instead of a story of abuse and the consequences of leaving abuse.  
 
A few quotes from the article “It was his house, I was just a guest.” “What I did as a mother did not mean anything.” “Now I have power. I am broke and I am struggling, but dammit, I have my two cents and I love it. I haven’t quite figured out how I will pay rent once the marital home is sold, or foreclosed.”

It seems to me that she was hearing in her marriage and in her role as a mother that with no paycheck, her life had no value. That she contributed nothing. So she left. Good for her, what choice did she have? Violence breeds in this place of believing that another has little value. It was not a safe place. But to offer her applause for having escaped with her two cents is such a diminishment of the seriousness of her situation. 

It seems a little like a gladiator sport. Put a mother in the arena and see if she survives. If she does, good for her. We applaud her courage. If not, well, maybe she should have "leaned in" a little bit more. Whatever the case, thumbs up or thumbs down, she is on her own in a system that does not recognize care and caregiving as work. A system we collectively support that recognizes only a paycheck as having value. No mother should have had to leave her home and her economic security in order to find respect or value.

We need to give this author, and other caregivers more than applause for surviving in a broken system. To offer this mother and all caregivers the protection and respect that they both need and deserve, we need to fix the system. We need to give the family economy a chance of survival by recognizing it as one of a partnership of both paid and unpaid work, both of equal value. And we need to give this all-important work to both genders to weave into their life design, supported by our larger community design.  

Riane Eisler's book, Creating a Caring Economy: The Real Wealth of Nations is where we can learn how to shift into a system which serves all of us, both men and women, more kindly, more generously and more sustainably. Dr Eisler's work at the Center for Partnership Studies is a cauldron of ideas and people determined to elevate the often invisible work of care and caregiving to its proper place by recognizing that paid or unpaid caring fo each other and for the planet that cares for us is the sacred intent of life. That profound elevation creates the possibility of changing what we value as a collective, and reordering how we measure a successful economy. That is the work that we all, both men and women must aspire to do.