Women’s Burden

“... the acute burden of being female”

—Michelle Obama, Becoming

SINCE I WAS INSOMNIAC in my early teens, I heard my parents quarreling at night. It took a while for me to puzzle out what was causing these arguments: my father Jack’s philandering ways. My mother, Mayno, I would later learn, had long been so tolerant of his ways that she offered to raise, along with my younger sister and me, one of his children from an unmarried woman. Nothing came of that, but I was up late one night when my father was absent on a hunting trip, and I heard my mother sobbing deeply during a long phone call. I finally went out to the living room, where the phone was, and I kept listening while she continued to cry and comment on what she was being told. After she hung up, I asked her why she had said something or other. She saw that I had guessed enough of the truth that she might as well tell me the whole of it.

The mother of a young woman who was a hostess at the hunting lodge where my father was staying had called Mayno and said that Jack (then in his early 30s) was asking her daughter (then in her teens) to carry on their affair after he left the lodge. The young woman’s mother was tearily begging my mother to stop this, even though Mayno told her she did not know what she could do in this case, as in similar ones that had earlier (and often) happened.

But after that painful phone call, and when she saw that I was aware of what was going on, she resolved to tell my father when he returned that she was going to divorce him. He thought he could survive this, as he had other affairs, and he did not want to leave us. So when he learned that I would not back up his bid to remain, he told Patsy, my younger sister, that her mom was driving him away for no reason. I thought it was noble of my mother not to tell Patsy the truth, which could curdle Patsy’s love for her father. I thought I should follow her example and not tell Patsy what I knew. This was