Best 9 quotes of Megan Stack on MyQuotes

But now it all slid through my mind: The years of come-ons from sources and colleagues. THe news organizations I'd roped off in my mind as no-gos because I'd sexually rejected some man who'd since become powerful, and didn't want to risk getting undercut and blackballed. The times I thought I was about to get raped. All the things that had been said to me, or said about other women in front of me, to be sure I didn't misunderstand my position as an amusing but ultimately inferior presence. We were welcome as long as we were young and beddable, and then we were supposed to do what self-respecting women did: disappear into a household somewhere. Tom had faced none of that. Tom had been free to move thorugh his career; there had been so little for him to naviaget. And I'd never explained it to him. I'd assumed he just knew, because I thought it was obvious. I'd been treated like an accessory. I'd been groped, and pawed and cornered. I'd let sly remarks slide off my back. It was all in the game, and I'd been eager to play. But now he looked at me blankly, as if I were not part of it, and it occurred to me that he had no idea. Did he really think his wife had been clever enough to be a woman in the world without being a woman in the world? There was so much to say I couldn't stand to start.

I'd been all around the world, and I've never yet found a place where women aren't hit and exploited and hated. Men needed us, but God, they hated us, too. Deeply, chronically hated us.

I floundered and scrambled in my mind, contemplating the filthy glorious mysteries of luck, of being born with things, the meaning of money, murder by poverty. It was immoral to have and pointless to give. I could give away everything and it would be nothing. The money would dry like dew, and we would join the impoverished masses, my children sleeping in dirt and begging from cars, waiting miserably for the hour of a death that would deliver us. And yet if I did nothing I was complicit. My soft life was an obscenity.

In the end, the answer is the men. They have to do the work. Why do we tie ourselves in knots to avoid saying this one simple truth? It's a daily and repetitive and eternal truth, and it's a dangerous truth, because if we press this point we can blow our households to pieces, we can take our families apart, we can spoil our great love affairs. This demand is enough to destroy almost everything we hold dear. So we shut up and do the work. No single task is ever worth the argument. Scrub a toilet, wash a few dishes, respond to the note from the teacher, talk to another mother, buy the supplies. Don't make a big deal out of everything. Don't make a big deal out of anything. Never mind that, writ large, all these minor chores are the reason we remain stuck in this depressing hole of pointless conversations and stifled accomplishment. Never mind that we are still, after all these waves of feminism and intramural arguments among the various strains of womanhood, treated like a natural resource that can be guiltlessly plundered. Never mind that the kids are watching. If you mind you might go crazy. Cooking and cleaning and childcare are everything. They are the ultimate truth. They underpin and enable everything we do. The perpetual allocation of this most crucial and inevitable work along gender lines sets women up for failure and men for success. It saps the energy and burdens the brains of half the population. And yet honest discussion of housework is still treated as taboo.

Somebody, after all, must wash and feed and train the kids and get the food and clean the house and care for the sick and elderly. That work is physically depleting, logistically daunting, and relentless. It is not a job, but a constant gaping demand for labor. It's a ceaseless work that has gobbled up our energy and stamina, eroded our collective health, and starved our communal mind of oxygen for generations. We did the work, taught our daughters to to the work (assuming we survived their births), and then we died. That was it. Domestic toil had ground us, one after the next, to dust. We had not been educated because then, naturally, we might balk at the work. We might have the audacity to point out that we were doing all the work. We might ask men to do some of the work, themselves.

Still it does not escape my attention that I paid in time. There is a lingering expectation that men will pay in money. But when it comes to time, it is almost always the woman who pays. And money is one thing, but time is life, and life is more. How many ideas, how many discoveries, how much art lost because the woman spent her time somewhere else? How many ideas stillborn, how many inventions undone, how much original thought passed off quietly to a man so that he can take credit- just not to waste, not to miscarry the idea, to pass it, one way or the other into the world?

Tom was saying, forget her, save yourself, pay attention to our family's needs! And I was saying, I can't forget her because her problem is also my problem and it has to stop somewhere.

We must do the essential work of the species in sickness and in secret. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised: We are still children when we learn to conceal the pain and blood of menstruation. We understand that the denial of our physical shell is the price of admission. We can join the men at work so long as we leave our bodies behind, or pretend that our bodies are just like their bodies. There is quiet sympathy from other women, but you must hide these things from the men because, as soon as they finish nodding gravely and sympathetically, they will remind you that this biological discrepancy was their point all along, and they will show you the door. Biology will be twisted into a rope and use to bind you.

You can overcome the things that are done to you, but you cannot escape the things that you have done. Here is the truth: It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are. The soldiers who don't die for us come home again. They bring with them the killers they became on our national behalf, and sit with their polluted memories and broken emotions in our homes and schools and temples. We may wish it were not so, but action amounts to identity. We become what we do.You can tell yourself all the stories you want, but you can't leave your actions over there. You can't build a wall and expect to live on the other side of memory. All of the poison seeps back into our soil.