How Women Feel on Labor Day

As we prepare for barbecues, pool parties, or Hurricane Dorian, many mothers are finishing up the potato salad, getting the kids dressed, checking flashlight batteries, or doing laundry before the power goes out. Their lists of domestic tasks have doubled or even tripled in the face of a holiday–hurricane twofer.

Although Labor Day is ostensibly about “real” labor and “real” jobs, it’s also a day forged through other types of labor: domestic and emotional. Every holiday requires event planning, homemaking, and getting people together. And unfortunately, the burden of this labor tends to fall on women.

Before the men chime in with wails that they do in fact do housework, let me explain: it’s not that you don’t do it. It’s that women do it more often.

Read the full piece on Medium.

The Singular “They”

As a writer and editor, I’m so glad that the singular “they” is becoming more accepted, for all the reasons you list and because it’s just. Damn. Easier. It’s taken some effort to convince my senior editor that it’s okay to use, and even more effort to convince my mother, who reads a lot of my stuff.

View the original, and what I was responding to, on Medium.