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p a r t i Keyword: Everyday Life Alex giggles his dark curly hair is almost shoulder length. He’s got on a Garfield the Cat shirt and a saggy cloth diaper. We’re unloading groceries from their plastic bags in the kitchen. He has developed his own game: he takes an item out of the bag, announces its name, and finds some place in the kitchen to deposit it. He can’t reach many of the shelves and cupboards. “Bananas” go not in the fruit bowl but on the shelf beneath the bowl. I follow behind, putting items in their proper places. Then he becomes wise to my corrections. “Loops!” he says for Fruit Loops, and puts them in the refrigerator with a sly smile. I smile back and patiently take them out and put them in the pantry. “Ice cream!” goes in the towel drawer. “Milk!” in the dog’s dish. Then he wanders farther from the kitchen, returning for new items, delighted with himself: cheese in the toy box, bread in the bathroom sink, a box of graham crackers on top of the hamster cage. He’s a little bricoleur, moving randomly yet with some reason throughout the house, redefining its places in his own small way. The bags finally empty, Alex smiles, “All done!” Yep, I say: thanks for the help! I set him up with magic markers and paper, and sneak around to the different rooms, gradually returning the items to the kitchen. I retrace his paths, further producing in my movement our domestic routine—closely intertwined, random, with few rules, yet still managed, to keep disorder just at bay. Alex is a tactician, as most children are, defying the strategists who attempt to contain them, rein them in, impose a rationality on the wonderful spontaneity of their lives. In his The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau divides the world into these two camps: tacticians and strategists . Tacticians are the weak, the marginal, the mobile, the insurgent, whose unpredictable and mainly unintentional movements through time and space make brief but ultimately unsuccessful incursions on the spaces of the strategists, occupiers of the institutions of rational capitalism and property. “A tactic is determined by the absence of power just as a strategy is organized by the postulation of power,” says de Certeau (38). Does that make me the strategist in this situation? I guess I am more powerful, putting things back in their proper places, installing some order within the home. I’ve become complicit with the larger mandate of parenting: socialization of your children into the world of rules, conformity, and rationality . Or have I? That’s the problem with de Certeau’s bifurcation of the world into tacticians and strategists: you can never acquire a stable place or you’ve gone over to the side of power. But what about stability for your kids? They require a place, stasis, property—all those things that indicate complicity but that you couldn’t raise a child without. And having a stable place doesn’t mean pleasure is negated. In fact, finding more room for pleasure within life’s everyday routines requires careful planning, constructing the places from which spontaneity can arise. The question for single mothers is how to create and maintain these spaces and times for play, how to carve joyful moments out of everyday routines, how to truly appreciate them when they happen, when the very work of managing by yourself threatens to erase the possibilities for pleasure. Perhaps I wanted to cut the game off immediately, just save time and put the groceries immediately in their place. But not really. I wanted to hold on to the pleasure of disorder even in the midst of exhaustion. The pleasure that erupts within the everyday work of mothers is not transcendent, for it is out of these very conditions of work that we find joy. It must be so, for otherwise there would be no time at all for play. How do we maximize pleasure , given the fact that, as Roger Silverstone writes in his book on television and the everyday, “everyday life is a continuous achievement, more or less ritualized, more or less taken for granted, more or less fragile, in the face of the unknown, the unexpected or the catastrophic” (165). In the rituals and routines, in the constant organization and negotiation between work and play, exhaustion and euphoria, single mothers as domestic intellectuals make everyday life happen for...

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