I’ll think of something….

My daughter Kate, who married an American, is now the matriarch of the family. She and her husband had 21 people for Thanksgiving dinner this year.. The attendance keeps growing, not only with births of new members but with addtions by splits and absorption. This year she roasted two turkeys, with stuffing to suit the specific tastes of some of the group - not sure what - gluten-free maybe? Her husband eats Paleo, so lots and lots of vegetables for him.

Kate reminds me of Helen Mirren playing the housekeeper in the movie, Gosford Park, reacting so swiftly and decisively to the unexpected dietary requests of the house guests. A few years ago at Christmas, we who were already seated drank all her special wine as we waited for several extra guests, grounded by a snowstorm and prevented from attending their distant dinners, to arrive at Kate’s table. Unfazed, she produced a beautiful belated feast - and more wine.

Arrangements get more complicated every year as families divide and multiply. I read a comment this week that children today have more grandparents today than ever in history, with grands and step-grands and great grands, because that generation has divorced and remarried more and is living longer. My mother used to add a lugubrious note to our post-Christmas tidying. As we were taking down the tree she would say cheerfully, I wonder who’ll be gone next year?” These days the question would more likely be, “I wonder who the new guests will be next year?”

All in the extended family.

This book, first published in 1975 by Dorothy Dinnerstein (1923-1992), is more relevant and needed than it has ever been and it might have a good chance of being heeded this time around. A seminal book for me, it was on every women’s studies bibliography. The sub-title, “Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise”, must give you a hint of what we are now calling the MeToo problem that Dinnerstein addresses:

“It seems possible that now, for the first time in history, women in substantial numbers hate, fear and loathe men as profoundly as men have all along hated, feared and loathed women.”

She uses Freud and mythology, hard-wired into our psyches, to remind us of what has been going on for so long. She emphasizes, insists on, the need for basic change in gender arrangements, a change that goes deeper than the recent ragged displacement of male sexual bullies. The malignant aspect which women have just begun to have the courage to call out is not going to change fundamentally until, Dinnerstein writes, “female-dominated child care ceases to be the basic condition within which ‘normal’ personality develops”. The good news is that it’s starting to happen, and I have the promising proof of it in my own great grandchildren, or rather, in their other caregivers, the fathers.

“Man’s hand must be as firm on the cradle as woman’s.”

It’s going to happen, it’s happening, and the government, finally, is helping, with the dispersement of maternity and paternity leaves. I have been so aware of this as I recall my utter solitude and isolation with my babies compared to the group efforts focused on my gregarious geegees (great-grands).

My copy of the book is studded with post-it notes. They and my yellow highlights give me an entree into the author’s thoughts but they’re not enough. I’m going to have to re-read it again. (How many times now?)