LITMIR.BIZ

      The town of Horicon seemed to still be asleep except for a fast food restaurant. I tapped DJ’s leg. “Do you want some food before we get to the marsh?”

      DJ sat up, looked right and left, laid his head back down, and ignored my question. “It still looks lousy outside. Isn’t April weather supposed to be nicer than March?”

      The last few days of March had teased us and sent some fifty-degree days to make us sweat in our winter clothes. March used the heavy dampness of our own bodies to cajole us into abandoning our down-filled ski coats and putting away the warm hats that flattened our hair. We even moved the high-traction boots (which were certified to twenty below zero) to the back of the closet. Then, April knocked us on our keisters by dumping an ice storm onto our bare heads and slick new Easter shoes.

      The ground was still with littered broken branches from the April storm when I’d stepped out of the front door in my blue terry bathrobe to retrieve the morning paper last week. I’d found myself wandering my suburban yard, searching for green spikes on bulbs. My bare fingers dug through the frosty leaf mulch trying to find signs of impending relief from brown and gray. The tips of daffodils and small bulges that promised a bloom offered a slight textual reward for my iced fingertips, but I needed more. Paul walked out looking for me or the paper and stared at his brown lawn while I squatted and poked in my frozen flowerbed.

      “It’ll be green soon.” He tried to sound optimistic, but then he looked up to the dark sky, shivered, hugged his arms against his chest, and added, “If it doesn’t snow.”

      I lifted my face to him. “I’ve had enough.” My bones felt cold; I hadn’t seen our neighbors since we were shoveling after the last snowstorm, and even then I only saw the middle of their faces as they complained from beneath their woolen scarves about the return of winter. I was tired of the weight of winter clothes and winter pounds. The trees had been bare for six months. Piled on top of all this dismay, my grown daughter Andrea had moved out and left me oh-so-second-fiddle to the man of her life, as it should be. It was time, but she left me outnumbered in my home. Paul and DJ reminded me of my minority status when we voted on Friday night movies; they wanted an action flick, overruling my pick, a quirky independent film. When it came to where to go for dinner, they vetoed Thai food in favor of burgers. I stood my ground even without my daughter’s vote and forbade the ash-colored paint that my son and husband suggested as a good color for the hallway.

      When the daffodils finally broke their winter dormancy and pushed up inches of green spikes of promise, my guys inadvertently stepped on them and smashed the only tiny slashes of spring in the flower garden. I interpreted their destructive behavior as if it were emblematic of the degradation of our planet under the leadership of the world’s paternalistic societies. They were sorry; I was sullen. In my climate-induced gloom, I began to ruminate.

      A newspaper story, with photos of nurses in wedding gowns who protested hospital management, reminded me of my personal career injustices. A hospital conglomerate had recently decreased health benefits for nurses, citing that the women could use their husband’s insurance. This isn’t true in our household, as my husband’s small business insurance is expensive and provides spotty coverage. We manage to get sick and injured in non-coverable ways. When I was a divorced mom and nurse, providing health insurance for my daughter, my lousy HMO benefits took almost a fourth of my take-home pay. In Wisconsin, almost 30 percent of all homes are single-parent households, and over 80 percent of these are headed by women. The national trends are similar. Problems concentrate in Milwaukee, where a third of all children live in poverty. Most poor children do not have an employed father. Medicaid covers many children’s basic health needs, but those who live slightly above the official poverty level, because of earned income, don’t qualify. Women still earn less than men for comparable jobs, seventy-seven cents on the dollar, and they bear a heavier burden when it comes to household work and child rearing. The differences between being a man and being a woman isn’t just biologic, it’s usually economic. A society that places women as helpmates and second-income wage earners engenders suffering for women and the children they support.

      As I considered my daughter going off on her own, with plans for career, marriage, and children, I worried that her gender might affect her economic future and therefore become a source of pain and suffering. The men in our lives bore no specific blame that I could pinpoint. Andrea’s fiancé has given her years of loving boyfriend credibility, and my Paul rates as a sweetheart a large percentage of the time, but less than half of all marriages are successful in raising children in the original two-parent household. The general culture still blunts the potential of females with notions of women as helpmates. I knew from experience how tough life can be for a single mom. I was in a funk, missing my daughter and awfulizing that the worst of the past might predict her future.