In all but the most modern of times, men and women have had very different work. There is, and was, a varying degree of overlap. “Women’s work” is something that the group could rely on being done while child care happened. But what makes up “women’s work” is what will always get done while the babies/toddlers get taken care of. [Definition Courtesy Elizabeth Wayland Barber – Women’s Work]

So historically, women cook and make clothes. We take care of small animals (chickens) and garden. We clean/maintain the home. Etc. We do distracted labor. Distraction shapes the brain. So women’s brains, regardless of the starting point, end up different from men’s brains – if women are doing “women’s work”. Distractions are also somewhat addictive – or at least habitual. “This is how life is shaped”. We get used to being distracted, and it becomes more difficult for us to concentrate for extended periods of time.

I was listening to Huberman this morning while I cleaned the kitchen and made breakfast. He had the author of Deep Work on, and they were discussing just this – the modern life, the modern workspace, and how to increase productivity for “intellectual labor”. {Huberman Episode Referenced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4ZfkezDTXQ&t=8718s}

This led me to an explosion in the brain. What if the disrespect that women endure because of their “stupidity” (in comparison with intellectual/focused men) is because of the dichotomy in women’s work vs. deep work? I remember my father saying once (with great sorrow) that he didn’t know a woman artist who truly excelled in her *single* field, as they were all dilettantes. (He was specifically talking about Frida Kahlo, wishing she’d focused on just one thing). Well yes. If you have a child – or even a duty to “keep house” for someone else, you simply cannot work without stopping, you cannot forget meals and sleep and concentrate and shoot out like an arrow into the dark.

IQ is passed on primarily through the female line. If women were fluff-heads, you’d soon run out of smart men.

So then what? How do we deal with this battle between women’s work and deep work? Are women forever sentenced to small thoughts and distraction? Should we surrender to a life lived as if we had the sharp noises in our ears, a la Harrison Bergeron? (We seem to be, as we surrender our attentions to our devices without much of a struggle).

Women, far more than men, have lives that are lived in stages. During the child-rearing stage of a woman’s life, she will be distracted. It’s a feature, not a bug. We want baby not to wander into the cooking fire, please. After the child-rearing stage of a woman’s life has wound up, there are many paths that life may take her down. And it is here that she must choose how to retrain her brain.

Whereas men’s mid-life crises stereotypes are all about fast cars and a clawing for youth, women’s mid-life crises tend to focus on “finding themselves”. And why not? Things change for us, in profound ways. We have … well, options is generous, as many of these “choices” choose themselves by the way you lived your previous stages of life, or the ways in which those with whom you’ve linked yourself have lived theirs. Woman does not live her life alone.

But when the children grow, a woman could choose to retrain her brain, and the battle between women’s work and deep work could end. Will she ever achieve, 30 years later, the heights that can be climbed without that detour? No. Was it really a “detour”, to bear and rear new human beings? Also no.

I was given a very good brain. All I wanted to do through school was get married and have kids. I daydreamed about it. I took a silly, fluffy walk through college so I could get to my main event without a whisper of delay. Given the choice between women’s work and deep work, I chose women’s work – with joy. I got married. I had kids. And now they are grown. And now? Now I have to decide what to do with the next thirty to forty years of my life.

I made choices to walk away from various professional paths. My life is tied (gloriously so) to my husband’s, and I don’t want to make the commitment to the long hours a young employee makes – I do not want to start at the bottom of the ladder. I want to spend time with him, especially as his path loosens up a bit. I do not want to go back to school. But I cannot live my life in Harrison Bergeron any longer – I am going insane. I *must* retrain my brain, I *must* regain my ability to concentrate, and I *must* indulge it. To do anything else would be untrue to myself.

Growing up, all effort was focused on a goal. You grow, you achieve in order to meet an end. But what will I get, if I grow simply to grow? But I must. My work here is done – and my next work must be done as the woman I am now, with all of myself, not part.

The butterfly has emerged from her cocoon… and then surrender to the wind.