One day, a man I love told me that happiness is a woman who sings in the house we live in. When I heard this sentence, “it went like a nail, a knife into the potato, the suture held up, let’s drink to that”, as Desjardins writes so well in the finale of his song And I slept in my chariot.
Hear a woman singing in the house.
Why did this sentence said by a man I love stir my verse? Because the woman in question was me and, although I would have liked to sing every day in my life, I often couldn’t.
I often think of this sentence and when I was asked to write a text to formulate my wishes, it was this that seemed to me to be the most important: that women often sing.
PHOTO ALAIN ROBERGE, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Marcia Driver
I know exactly what it would take for my wish to have the chance to be granted: that we collectively devote time to understanding what prevents women from singing.
We talk about it without knowing it when we discuss the mental load, but as long as we only denounce the fact that the lists of things that women must manage, supervise and accomplish grow longer from year to year, we will be far from the moment when we will hear the first melodious notes of happiness coming out of their mouths.
For a long time I did not sing in the houses I lived in and shared, too preoccupied with managing the smallest details of the household which sometimes housed up to six children. And don’t let anyone tell me that I should have delegated or put less pressure on my shoulders, because I’m making him swallow my broom and the dustpan with it.
Question: but who prevented me from singing or rather what prevented me?
Answer: the hamster that turned the wheel of my mental load. When our basket of dirty laundry is overflowing with socks, underpants and towels, we don’t want to let out a song, but rather a sigh of exasperation as long as the lists under which we are crumbling.
The holiday season is a trying time for many women: the preparation of rituals (whether culinary, emotional or linked to activities organized on a quarter-turn), the management of the vacation site, not to mention the elves (whose happen), who spill flour on the floor or roll out toilet paper at night.
Several women told me that they loved the holiday season for the past two years when (due to the pandemic), they had to take it easy on the activities, the visit and the making of spruce branch centerpieces. I am convinced that many learned to sing during this period, to hum at the very least.
I would like so much that women no longer have to do list posted on the door of their fridge but to be list.
I wish to live in a society where women would have the momentum to sing without flats and that the expression of their happiness would be broadcast on the carpet (dusty or not), on the loudspeakers of society.
We will be weighed down with mental stress and long to-do lists over and over again until we understand this:
The mental load follows from the emotional load.
Since the dawn of time, women have been entrusted with this responsibility: to be at the service of everyone’s happiness. We were asked to sign a contract where there were dozens of clauses in such small print that not only did we not manage to read them, but we could never have imagined that someone would have wanted to trap us in this way. . That’s what we are in the end, trapped, like caged hamsters.
As soon as I became a mother, 35 years ago, I signed this contract without my knowledge. Why ? Because my ancestors had also done it before me, without knowing it.
I did everything to prevent my daughters from signing it and I believe I succeeded. How can I come to affirm this? Because I often hear them sing. My grandson even told me recently:
“Grandmother, do you have earplugs?”
“Why do you want that, my Gustave?”
— Because my mother can’t stop singing, it’s really tiring!
“That’s good news, big boy. And to answer your question, I have earplugs, but I’ll never lend them to you, because I want you to hear it often, the melody of happiness.
Same for you. I wish you in 2023 to be able to hear the symphony of women who sing, because without them society is deprived of an essential soundtrack.
* Through her conferences, virtual trainings and books, she dedicates her life to making more and more women sing.