Gains and Losses

In my mother’s last weeks with cancer my sister and I once met the lady manager of our apartment building. She enquired us about our mom and then said:

‘Your mother is blessed to have both daughters beside her!’

At that moment I was mostly impressed by the American way of finding good sides to any situation (Russian compassion would be typically expressed in graver terms).   

Later, however, the direct meaning of the remark caught my attention: indeed, those of us, who in the end are surrounded by the loving family, are lucky. Even if you have it to the last day, your siblings may be far away and head-over-heels busy.

But there is more to this picture than reassuring smiles and kind words. This is from the book I am currently reading:

 ‘…She took down extra pillow and quilts from the shelves, shoved the bed up to the window, and propped Eva where she could see the doings in the yard. She went back, put one syringe in the water, finished up the pies and put them in the oven, then brought a little tepid water in a cup for Eva to drink. She did drink, which was good, and her color was up. Her eyes brighter.’

‘The Master Butcher Singing Club’, by Luise Erdrich

Eva is a German immigrant, a butcher’s wife in the Prohibition era, who is dying of cancer.  ‘She’ – is her friend and neighbor, a younger woman without a profession, a high school dropout and daughter of a small town drunkard.  The woman earns her living by helping in the butcher shop. She also nurses Eva out of love and respect.

What is important, both these women are, in modern terms, ‘uneducated’. All their skills are limited to meeting household needs and taking care of others.

Frontier woman

The female characters in the book (as well as some women of the older generation, we know) are remarkable experts in what they do, but on the modern social scale their skills are evaluated very humble.  A woman today that stays at home and has no career aspirations is often considered not very bright, or lazy. She is almost expected to explain herself, and I know a few who feel inferior even for a temporary break in corporate career.   

On the other hand, the prestige of many professions, as well as their financial worth, notably devalues just because too many women are now pursuing them. 

Another sad social paradox. 

But there is a third side to the situation that bothers me most: what we have lost by persistently disengaging women with humble family matters.

…Those bright and creative, who a century ago channeled their natural observance and smarts into making life around them comfortable and dignified…

…Those strong and daring, who kept their loved ones safe and, by their own everyday example, taught children to face life challenges and to persevere…

Now, when we need a fraction of their domestic expertise we go to specialists.

Well, to do what an uneducated neighbor in the extract above did for Eva, we would need the services of:

A certified nurse (preferably, 24-7)

A personal chef (specifically instructed to make everything from scratch)

A skillful housekeeper - to maintain things that poor Eva could not do anymore for her family of five

But even if one has money to pay for all the above, a certain ingredient would still be missing – that is, the whole-hearted care.

It just cannot be bought!

This is not so, because there are good and bad nurses, or good and bad housekeepers, but because development of ‘thick skin’ is an unavoidable stage of professional maturity. You either suffer with every client of yours, destroying your mental and physical health, or you figure out the ways of protecting yourself during your job and - of getting over it, as soon as the job is done. 

This genuine care is not even a component, but rather the binding agent that turns detached impersonal services with all their ‘9-to-5’ limitations, lack of ‘current knowledge’  and ‘honest human mistakes’ into the adjusted to a tee, living and breathing supporting system.

It makes mother a better doctor than a member of the medical academy and - a better cook than French chef.       

Quietly women did it for centuries turning wilderness into civilization and chaos – into live. But the appreciation of society was elsewhere, and in search for this appreciation many started seeking more respected roles, leaving traditional occupations behind or delegating them to machines and services.

Now we take a pill for every ailment and battle child obesity.

Besides other, more material reasons, this is also the price we pay for the deeply rooted in modern culture look down on clothes mending, floor scrubbing and lullaby singing. 

How Clean is …Clean?

It seems like a major trend in human civilization that every new generation raises its standards of hygiene. And we do not need history books to prove it.

I am old enough to remember wooden stove in our kitchen and once-a-week bath that my mom and grandma arranged for me by heating water on that stove in a zinc bucket; then - pouring this water into a portable tub mounted on two stools for stability. 

A lot of labor went into this procedure, including the efforts of keeping the room uncommonly warm. So, no wonder, it was not provided too often.

I also remember that keeping myself clean was quite tricky for me.  In my neighborhood  kids spent a lot of time outdoors. We played hide-and-seek behind somebody’s coal shed, built mud fortresses, tasted almost everything that grew around and washed our hands only when were specifically demanded to.



The Chess Match (1902) by Carl Probst (1854-1924)

That’s how our mothers wanted us to be

Mothers were understandably frustrated by the inability to save our clothes pressed and spotless for long. They expressed this frustration quite openly (nowadays it would’ve been considered child abuse). So, naturally, the necessity of staying clean felt like  a burden and quite unrealistic.



That’s how we really were (old post card)



Later, when I was raising my daughter, we had our own bathroom with hot shower in it. I was proud of “taking good care” of my daughter and for a while she was a very neat little girl.

That all had ended when she went to kindergarten. To my surprise she became extremely enthusiastic about dirt. Picking her up in the evenings after work I would again and again find my daughter in a sandbox diligently steering something like a mud-pie. Her hands and feet  were always dripping wet and dirty. As uninformed as I was at that time on this type of behavior, I sensed that she was filling some kind of natural void and let her continue doing it.  

Well, working full time I could not stop her anyway.

For many years my ambitions for cleanliness were much higher than available means. At times we had no heating or hot water in the tap (sometimes, no water at all). These ambitions were completely met only in America, where for the first time in my life I had a washer and drier.

The dignity of daily shower followed by putting on fresh clothes head to toe had a wonderful smell! In fact nice smells were everywhere – of honey-glazed popcorn in a movie theater, of potpourris in friends’ houses, or of elegant perfume in the mall.  

My husband’s allergic cough was one of the first warning signals that made us question the sources of nice smells. With time we learned that chemical fragrances can be toxic and some of them disturb hormonal balance, others are linked to asthma and cancer. I was particularly disappointed to discover that pleasant air fresheners and fragrant candles could actually be poisonous.

To make things worse, the study, published in the Environmental Impact Assessment Review, found that many popular scented products – including those that claim to be "green" – emit numerous chemicals not listed on the label, including some considered toxic and possibly carcinogenic. In many cases out of an average of 17 chemicals per product only one compound -- ethanol – was actually listed on the product labels (ttp://depts.washington.edu/exposure/press_release.html)

This made choosing safe beauty and cleaning products quite confusing: I either had to do an extensive research every time I was out of shampoo or - to go for completely unscented stuff with minimum ingredients (like two or three).

Then new information arrived that put all my traditional ideas regarding cleanliness upside-down. 

One of them I already mentioned in “Dismissal, Introduction...” – some studies say that organic produce is better eaten unwashed because it contains good bacteria beneficial for digestion and immune system. These bacteria are  lacking in our diet otherwise, and water, on the other hand, includes a long list of contaminants. (The last is not theory but everyday life!)

Other studies promote early introduction of babies to natural environment with all its germs. Babies' exposure to germs and bacteria during their first year of life is considered critical for the formation of a strong immune system.

According to the study provided by the University of Wisconsin and published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, having pets in early childhood protects kids from cold later:
      
…young children who grew up with a dog in the home had stronger immune systems that were more effective at fighting off chronic respiratory problems.

And another study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that kids who grow up with cats or dogs may have a lower risk of developing pet allergies as well as other common allergies like ragweed, grass, and dust mites (http://www.ivillage.com/10-health-benefits-owning-pet/4-b-315239#ixzz1Ci1WNHNE). 

Even soap is not good for you anymore: sources say that using soap on your skin too often strips it of important protective elements and makes it more prone to various skin conditions (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/fashion/31Unwashed.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all).

Of course, some of these conclusions may be untrue or exaggerated. However, they all were provided independently and like elements of the puzzle create a quite clear picture of excessively sterile civilized life.

Apparently it makes us weaker rather than stronger and in combination with myriads of new industrial pollutants drastically increases our vulnerability.

Or putting it plainly, in our perpetual struggle to be clean we probably hit the top (or the bottom).