Math Class isn’t Tough. What Comes After is Tough.
by Jessica Manack
Can a woman ever really stop tallying the figures of her life?
It was just before 9:00 a.m., we were finishing breakfast, the toddler playing with his food more than eating it. I carried the dishes into the kitchen. “I’ll clean up.”
“Really?” my husband asked. “I can do it.”
“No…I can use a break from the baby. I’ve been up with him for…four and a half hours,” I calculated.
“Fine. You don’t have to remind me of the spreadsheet, you know,” my husband said.
Stop saying that all the time, I almost said. I know it’s not a contest. But then I stopped myself. My husband had never brought up “the spreadsheet” before. It was my ex-boyfriend, the one before him, who envisioned and frequently referenced this invisible fence springing up between us, this killer of lust.
Sometimes girls are raised to fear math, but it felt natural to keep track. Numbers have always been how I made sense of the world, of my relationships, my future. We were young when we’d gotten together, me and the ex, just out of college, living in houses with broken seams open to the cold, leaking the heat it was so hard to pay for. Idealistic and optimistic, I wanted to build something together.
I remember once, early on, as he reminded me that he needed a ride to class, asking him, Do you want to chip in for gas, then? He got angry. But it was my first experience of having any means and I was scared of being taken advantage of. I didn’t expect anyone to support me, having been let down too many times before.
We disagreed on many things. How clean a house should be. Who should pay which bills when. Who should clean the kitchen. I made charts that I’d stick to the fridge, trying to lay it all out. Isn’t this what people meant when they said relationships were work?
Women keep track of numbers – it’s what we do. How many pounds need to be lost, how many calories are allowed in pursuit of this goal. How much butter costs at each store in the neighborhood. What week the department store was having its semiannual sale, and if we could wait until then to buy the new shoes.
But math is often anti-feminine, not anything anyone really wants to see a woman bother with.
I saw my ex again recently, after years, and he was explaining to me how he’d made his latest work of art, a sculpture composed of rows of LED lights moving in sync with the visitors. “Sorry…” he paused. “I know you always hated math.” I recoiled at the way his memory of me had contorted with time. I was the girl who tried to make sense of the awkwardness of my first relationships by drawing actual love triangles, acute and obtuse, trying to make the angles add up – the boy, the two girls, so much yearning, so little reward. The girl who always had the pizza-delivery number in her mind. The girl who’d call to get the latest movie showtimes. The helpful girl.
He would work for hours on these pieces, room-sized, then gallery-sized, forgetting the clock, going to bed sometime after me, sleeping without care until the time he needed to be at work was approaching. I listened for stirring, incredulous that he set no alarm, expecting me to ensure he wasn’t late. I was good at keeping track of things, but I didn’t want to be the only one doing it. I could make better progress on my goals without needing to mother a perfectly capable adult. In the end, his fear had been justified: the spreadsheet had won.
And so continued this love of tallying, as I ended one relationship and started a new one, with the man who became my boyfriend, then husband, then co-parent. We were a good team: making lists of tasks, crossing them off once completed. Trimming the costs from our wedding spreadsheet. Buying our invitations with a coupon. Using local wildflowers for my bouquet.
Numbers were not only my love language; they were my anything language. If I had been keeping track of how long I’d been awake with our son, it was not out of a desire to receive payback from my husband, but because I was incredulous, myself: here I was, hours before I’d used to rise, with the equivalent of half a workday under my belt. What was even harder to believe, these days, for a fastidious maker of to-do lists, was that this could be the case without having gotten much accomplished.
We had hoped for and loved our son, but I couldn’t forget the fact that the only reason he existed was because of the notepad and pen on my nightstand, the list of basal body temperatures, 98.2, 98.3, 99.1. Life was full of unpretty figures. Life depended on unpretty figures, logs of diaper changes and feeding sessions, and, then, growth.
It wasn’t as if I’d learned nothing from my past relationships – this time around, I knew to outsource the less-sexy tasks of a union: the toilet-scrubbing, the mowing of the lawn. But there were always things to keep track of, weren’t there?
“You’re obsessed with equity!” my husband groaned, as I put half of the cash from the ATM into his wallet. Numbers sprung up like weeds, forcing back the edge of romance.
I’d grown up with a younger brother by my side, had grown used to a one-for-me, one-for you approach to life. Wasn’t equity the goal here? Wasn’t that why we were tracking my cycles on our calendar, working on giving our son a sibling, so that he understood that sharing was part of being in the world?
When I was a kid, Barbie famously said “Math class is tough!” and there was outrage from a nation of women who’d fought long and hard to be acknowledged as having abilities equal to men. So, we understood: Math is not hard. We are made for math. We are going to math the hell out of this life. But math includes limits, too. Maybe trust didn’t refer only to things like a shared bank account or asking the other to read one’s emails to them during road trips. Maybe it meant letting the math fall away, turning off the part of your brain that’s keeping track. And, before I could do this with my partner, I’d have to grant permission to myself.
Jessica Manack holds degrees from Hollins University and lives with her family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her writing has recently appeared in San Pedro River Review, Black Fork Review, and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.