I was reminded of this incident a few nights ago when I had to halt a conversation in order to spear a particularly stubborn piece of kale that I’d been chasing around my plate with my fork for the better part of a minute. Apparently, I can’t eat and speak — or gaze compellingly — at the same time.
I’ve also found that I can’t engage in conversation (or sing too enthusiastically) while driving unless my passengers and I are content with missing half of our exits and having to double back for every other turn. And while I can actually walk and chew gum, I have been known to stumble when thinking too hard about transforming my sugary wad of Bazooka into a pretty pink bubble. Suffice it to say, I’m not much of a multi-tasker.
And yet I regularly hear that women are better at simultaneously processing multiple details than men due to the superior size of the link between the left and right hemispheres of their brains. And ain’t I a woman?
Look at me.
Look at my corpus callosum!
I have plowed and planted ...
Oops, sorry. March was Women’s History Month. I’ll have to save my Sojourner Truth speech for next year. But I am a woman — and a mom and a teacher and a writer and a wife and a cook and a problem solver. And sometimes I’m all of those things at once. And ain’t that multi-tasking?
I’ve decided that it is, and I’ve also decided that multi-tasking happens at two different levels. Much as movements of the body are divided into fine and gross motor skills, I believe multi-tasking has both fine and gross components. Fine multi-tasking skills, for instance, allow a person to check her email while also acknowledging that her husband has walked into the room and spoken to her. This, I cannot do. Gross multi-tasking skills, on the other hand, are my forte. I can hold down a job, parent and homeschool while also managing to put meals on the table, pay the bills on time and stay on top of the laundry (more or less). Large tasks, big pictures, macrosystems — these things I can throw into the soup all at once and keep them all from getting burned. But the moment someone asks me a question or puts a good song on the radio — well, that’s why we keep batteries in the smoke alarms.
So yes, I am a woman, and I am worthy of my colossal corpus callosum. I’m such a good multi-tasker, in fact, that I even manage to find time to gaze directly — and captivatingly — into my husband’s eyes at least once a day. Just not when I’m eating.
Belinda Ray is a homeschooling mother and freelance writer who finds time to write when her children and their friends have lightsaber battles in the yoga room (but only if the laundry is already folded and everyone’s been fed).