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UNDER COVERS
“Dispatches From A Not-So-Perfect Life Or How I Learned To Love The House, The Man, The Child”
by Faulkner Fox
review by Amy Bauer
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Some books that you read help you reflect on your past. You spin off the author’s words and find yourself relating to relationships, feelings and moments between the characters. However, other books give you insight into your future. “Dispatches From a Not-So-Perfect Life” did exactly that for me. The story revolves around a woman becoming a mother and a wife while struggling to maintain her sense of self. Being a 20-something on the outskirts of both motherhood and wifedom, this book seemed something of a crystal ball.
Author Faulkner Fox gives us an inside look at her life, both as a single, self-sufficient young woman and as a married mother of two. We journey through her past loves and failed relationships, various career moves - from getting her Ph.D to working for NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League) - and her ongoing introspection about balancing her inner life with the demands of a family. We see that even a woman who seems to have it all — a beautiful house, husband, children, and career — can still feel empty.
“I felt that my loneliness came from some complex bundle, a personal or structural sickness perhaps: the disturbing inability to feel connected to loved ones who were standing right by me because endless domestic tasks — laundry, dishes, trash, vaccinations, taxes, cleaning the fishbowls — seemed to be always calling my name; a dearth of wandery, deep conversations with those who knew me well; and inadequate involvement in the social movements I cared about,” Fox says.
In an amusing section of the book, she describes her need to keep an ongoing domestic score, which she calls “Frequent Parenting Miles.” Feeling disappointed and overwhelmed by a disproportionate split in parental responsibility, and an ongoing resentment for exchanging her career for motherhood, she charts out the time spent caring for a baby, down to the breastfeeding. “Power breeds bad behavior, and domestic heterosexual coupling as I saw it literally everywhere I looked was women with less power than their husbands,” says Fox.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book because of the unbridled honesty behind Fox’s words and thoughts. We get an inside look at the fears, doubts, guilt, anxieties, complexities and compromises commonly made in the life of a married mother.
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