The Mammoth Paradox

A feminist reflection between generations

Let me set your expectations. This post contains no answers. It is a simple story of a late twenty woman (me) going through a little bit of an existential crisis and her mom rationalising her thoughts with a story about mammoth hunting.

The back story

Let me give you a bit of context… This is a story about a conversation between my mom and me.

To understand where this is coming from, you need to know a few things about me. I have always worked hard to get the medal, to be at the top, not because I am a do-gooder but because I have a massive chip on my shoulder. I am a bit of a box checker.

It is the typical scenario of an underestimated child left aside by the education system who wants to prove to the entire world that she can do it, and probably better than them.

The results are, an entire life (so far) spent chasing a way to “be better than them” without once properly stopping to think. Think to first, ask myself what I want in life and what makes me happy and second, deal with this chip on my shoulder that has metamorphosed into imposter syndrome.

Anyway, now that this overly personal introduction is over let me tell you the story behind this catchy (and cryptic) title.

My husband and I decided to move from London to Singapore, and I had high hopes for our Singaporean life.

You see we had been living in London for five years and it was great, but a lot of the times it felt like we were living to work and not working to live. London, as beautiful and exciting as it is, can suck the life out of you.

So as any good millennial would do instead of facing our apparent incapacity to have some balance in our life, we fled to the other side of the world thinking it will be better there, and for a minute it was promising.

Singapore is fantastic, it is warm, it is the doorway to Asia and having a deep wanderlust we were ready to get settled and then travel. It was the perfect plan. We both managed to get good jobs, good salaries. We will do what we love at work and keep some time for travelling and reconnecting with each other, the dream.

Then, BOOM 💥 Covid-19 happens, literally a couple of weeks after we got to Singapore. Long story short, my husband lost his job and decided to go on a professional reconversion.

The actual story

This is where the story really starts. Suddenly, my little plan of a sweet life where I enjoy my hard-earned savings in wonderful travels vanishes and enters the existential crisis.

Why have I worked so hard these past ten years?

Why did I literally almost kill myself with caffeine and sleepless nights to get my degrees?

Why did I overwork myself to the point of exhaustion in the past five years?

Why, if not to enjoy it? Will I ever be able to enjoy it?

Is this the game? Is it going to collapse every time I am about to relax?

I know quite melodramatic, but we all have these moments of weakness. Don’t judge me.

As I said, I worked hard, and for the past five years, I have started to earn more than my husband. After a few adjustments in our dynamic, this was something that we were quite proud of. We defined ourselves as a modern couple with a healthy competition to do better than the other, pulling each other up.

I felt like a good feminist.

Evidently, when the latest crisis hit us, I pushed my husband to use this opportunity to find something that makes him happy, and he did. He is going back to school for three months. He is re-training at General Assembly to become a Software Engineer. I am so proud of him.

Great story, right? Well…

I am proud of him. I definitely think that this is what he should do, what we should do; but what does it mean for my little dream life?

Here come the bad feminist thoughts…

“I wish I was with someone that earns more than me so that I do not have to worry about that pressure; so that I could just enjoy the money I have instead of feeling guilty every time I touch it because it is for our future.”

Sure, there are a few things to unpack here like that notion of future and guilt, but let’s stay on feminism for a minute.

I then did what we often do when in doubt or guilty; I called my mom and explained the situation.

She hilariously rationalised my feelings.

She told me (in French),

“Ma puce [cute name], that is entirely normal that you feel like that. If you think about it, back in the days’ women had to stay in the cave to birth and feed the babies, so genetically they have less physical strength. The man had to go out and hunt the mammoth.

Today, things are different both men and women hunt the mammoth, but if you put things in the perspective of humankind evolution it is recent, so we still need to adapt to the new status quo.

It is ok for you to want to hunt the mammoth, but it is also ok for you to want help and to think that sometimes the mammoth is too big.”

Well, she always does that, being profound in a weird way without realising it. I shared her theory with my best friends on our WhatsApp group called “Desperate Housewives”, and we coined it the Mammoth Paradox.

As I said at the beginning of this post, there are no real learnings here but still, let me tell you what I got out of this conversation with my mom.

It is ok for me to hunt the mammoth for the household, but it is also ok for me to mourn my princess fantasies. The reality is that I won’t be whisked away in a private jet on a secret date with a full designer outfit waiting for me in the plane, but I also won’t have to carry all these day-to-day and future worries alone. Really, if you think about it (and look at the science), we need at least two people to hunt a mammoth.

Moral of the story, there is no good or bad feminism. There are just moments in life where we do the best we can with what we have.

Covid-19 is hard on relationships, and as much as we can, we need to keep our gaze on the horizon line. Better days are ahead, but be grateful for what you have today.

I am grateful to be able to provide for my home so that my husband can learn a new trade and feel fulfilled in his career. I know that if or when the situation is reversed, he will do the same thing.

Thanks for reading this self-centred story. I hope that it made you laugh in some way and/ or that you gain something from it.

A few acknowledgements — Covid-19 is creating really deep problems for people around the world, divorce procedures have spiked, families live in precarious homes and violence in households has spiked too. This story is told from a place of privilege, I am not minimising the greater impact of Covid-19. If you can donate to a local organisation to help them save families either from violence or precarity do it.

🙌

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ZGC.