Moving Pains

For a good portion of the earlier part of this week, I was helping my friends R~ & M~ move into their new apartment. I haven't moved in about five years, which is about the longest time I've been in any one place since I was living with my parents. I tallied up the number of times I have moved in my life and came up with 19. Nineteen! Can you imagine? Granted, one of those moves was before the age of four which I can barely remember, but that means that I have moved 18 times since the age of 18, the second big move of my life. Thirteen of those moves were with my ex-husband. I will forego explanations here, but this fact will become more relevant as I go on.


As we were packing up the old apartment earlier this week, my friend R~ collapsed in the kitchen and grumbled something about having to do "80% of the work." Now to be fair, it is true that he and his buddy were spending a tremendous effort lugging heavy, awkwardly-shaped pieces of furniture down the stairs and placing them, tetris-like, into the moving van, and all in the heat of California in July. So I don't blame him entirely for voicing this sentiment. On the other hand, my friend M~, his wife, was responsible for packing up the kitchen, which is an equally Herculean task in its own way. By the time I had arrived there on Tuesday, M~ had already completed about half the job, and it took her and I together most of the afternoon and some of the next morning to complete the rest. I remembered, as I was packing, that this is a familiar pattern: the kitchen is always the last to be packed and the last to be unpacked, at least in my experience. So I found myself feeling a little nettled by his attitude.


But his comment brought back memories-- or not memories exactly, but more a resonance with many such moves and many such arguments. It got me thinking. So I'm going to propose a theory here which I hope won't get me accused of being sexist or solipsistic. Just remember that I am basing my theory on my personal experience of 13 moves with the opposite gender and what little I know of human nature in nearly 42 years of existence.


When it comes to moving, men think in terms of division of labor. I do this. You do that. It's a 50-50 split until someone starts slacking, and then immediately the male mind starts calculating the percentage. Now it's 60-40, now it's 80-20, etc.


In contrast, I think women look at moving as a community effort. We all work together and do what needs doing until the job is done. Packing for a woman is not a simple task. It is not a driven, linear task. Each item pulled from a cupboard or drawer (other than maybe the cereal boxes) is a potential emotional memory gravity well. You pull that old sugar bowl out from the back of the cupboard and wipe the dust off, and, oh, this was grandma's, remember? Or, you remember when we got this on that trip to... and so on. Packing for a woman is a constant battle with emotional currents. I would argue that it requires just as much effort to stay on task as it would to swim in a straight line across a raging river.


In terms of sheer volume, R~ may be right. Maybe he and the men he had helping him did move 80% of the apartment. But I don't think it's an accurate assessment, nor do I think it's a fair one. We're looking at apples and oranges here. We can't set up a scale and weigh furniture against kitchen appliances and fragile household items. And if we did, it would take the wisdom of Anubis to determine the difference.


In the end, I think R~ was searching for validation and perhaps a little well-deserved praise. I wish I had had the presence of mind to do so at the time. Packing a kitchen is a tedious, wearisome task, but one far more within the bounds of my capabilities than moving heavy furniture. Perhaps instead of justifying the delays in the kitchen packing, I should have praised his hard work and his contribution to the moving effort. But, then again, perhaps I was wiser to let R~ and M~ work things out on their own, as husbands and wives have done since the first people moved out from their caves.






57 Days til the Burn