The last few days I've been reading some from the Apocryoha. What's that? It's a set of books, written thousands of years ago, that didn't make it into the Bible. More specifically, into the Old Testament. Yes, a committee decided what went in and these books didn't make the cut.
So this morning I read about this guy named Tobit. He goes blind due to having bird droppings fall into his eyes. His nephew supports him for a while but then his wife has to go out and get a job in order to take care of him.
At one point he gets really mad at her because he doesn't believe she's actually earning all that she's bringing in. (How did you really get that goat?)
This made me laugh because it reminded me that we women have been taking care of people "forever" despite the fact that they don't always appreciate it and sometimes even resent it.
Gloria Steinem is in town. She's 75 and still at it. Here's a quote from a speech she made recently:
...Now we need an effort to attribute a value to caregiving, whether it's done by women or men - but of course it's still done about 90 percent by women. It's a third of the productive work in the country...and not rewarded. It's invisible.
Yes, I agree, after all these thousands of years, we need to attribute a value to caregiving.
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