I Didn't Know My Father Was a Writer It was a total shock to me when I read an essay that seemed taken straight from my father's mouth. My father and the author might have been close if not for the four states between Ohio and Texas. The essay is about the author, Scott Russell Sanders,'s attempt to understand what women feel they are missing; when in his experiences a man's life has little or no privilege. I relate in every way to the author's ideas. There's nothing I can't connect with because I've heard these stories since I was two and I see them all in my head. Sanders describes the pain and hardships that husbands and fathers had to endure. It also describes the advantages that wives and mothers had. He feels confused when he is first told about the oppression of women. She has never seen women's work so hard compared to men's. Only later in life does she look back and see, exactly, what women had to endure. Sanders had never seen “…what a prison a house could be” (77), until he took the time to look back in retrospect and see for himself. I agree with Sanders; men had much more difficulty, physically, than women. However, women's lives were, mentally, just as difficult if not more so. Growing up, I heard stories all my life of my grandfather working until his hands bled and coming home, during the day, only to bandage them; and my grandmother who raised four children and took care of the household chores, all the while taking care of the vegetable garden; I had adapted to these images. While reading the essay, I saw my grandfather's "...hands tattooed with scars" (Sanders 76), and my grandmother "...tending all day to the needs of little children" (Sanders 77). Depending on how you looked at it, things were more difficult, but still, men and women both had difficult lives. Sanders wrote a compelling essay about his life, but not everyone lived his life. And not everyone grew up hearing similar stories, so their views on gender burdens will inevitably differ.