Confessions of a Housewife

Just checked to see when I last posted something--over a month ago. Who was it that said "life is what happens when you're making other plans"? I'm finding that particularly apt right now.

Since my last posting, there's been a lot of life--tinged with the shadow of death--around here. My baby boy turned three years old. Some close family family members are moving to start a new chapter of their life in Kentucky. My sister-in-law is dealing with a cancer diagnosis just passed down to her mother. A close member of our extended family (who, being proud and disinclined to enjoy having minutae about his/her life paraded across the Internet, shall remain nameless) is sick, very sick. We've been doing a lot of caregiving over the past month, wondering what the final out come of all this sickness will be. It's been reminding me of the vigils we kept last year at my father-in-law's bedside just before he passed away, and the time my grandfather lived with my husband and me after my grandmother passed on.

Caregiving. It seems to come with the territory of family, those who are bound to you through blood and marriage. At least, that's how it's seemed in my life. I've been spending a lot of time this past month babysitting so other relatives can visit at the hospital, preparing meals, running errands. Doesn't leave a lot of time to write.

The thing about being a stay-at-home mother/housewife in this day and age is that, well, we're a bit of a dying breed. There just doesn't seem to be a lot of underscheduled people in the world. There's not a lot of options for spur-of-the-moment babysitters, meal cookers, errand runners. (Believe me--I've been looking for a spur-of-the-moment babysitter for three years.) And I've been a little proud of the fact that my life has room for emergencies, room for unscheduled stops and u-turns. I'm grateful for it. It makes me remember why I wanted to do this in the first place--to have time for my family, not just my immediate family, but my extended family as well. To have a life that has space in it.

I've found myself drifting a lot this summer, watching time float by. I've been restless and resentful of these large blocks of unscheduled time that seem only able to be filled with the relentless constancy of tedious chores--the same dishes, the same diapers, the same laundry, the same dirty carpets and empty cat bowls. I've felt invisible and useless. But this past month I have remembered the blessing of being able to say "yes" when someone desperately needed a chunk of my time. I forget sometimes, holed up inside this house, that in this insanely overstuffed, multitasking world that the gift of time is a very great gift indeed.

It'sa delicate business, being a housewife in the modern age. Most of us stick with the "stay-at-home mom" label, and I usually do, too. It makes what you do seem noble enough that the modern world at least pays lip service to your sacrifice, even if they don't really mean it. You are sacrificing your career potential to stay at home for your children, to give them the best you can possibly give.

But there's more to it. I'm not just a stay-at-home mom. I'm a housewife, too. Some stay-at-home moms may be just that, with housekeepers or maids to take care of the housewifery so they can solely be mothers. I can't speak for them. (I can't afford regular maid service.) So I'm a housewife, too. And boy, is that an unappreciated job. No one even bothers to pay lip service to that one--in fact, the term 'housewife' is suspect, as if you're a Stepford Wife Clone in a 50s housedress and apron. In our culture, housework is reviled. It is not something to take pride in, it is something to be foisted on to someone else at the earliest possible economic opportunity. When speaking of housekeeping, it is only respected or admired if one is discussing it in the way of Martha Stewart or Real Simple magazine--if one is speaking of making a home beautiful, decorating it, organizing it with $5,000 worth of cunning little bins from the Container Store.

But meanwhile, someone's got to clean the toilets, vacuum the crumbs off the carpet, wash the fingerprints off the windows and iron the laundry. Someone's got to change the sheets, wipe down the sticky railing, pick up the toys and cook dinner. Every day. Again and again and again and again. And the main thought that runs through your head as you pick up the same stupid dump truck off the same stupid playroom floor for the 50th time that day is THIS IS NOT THE REASON I EARNED A MASTER'S DEGREE. You can finesse a little glory and prestige out of staying home to raise children. You can massage some respect out of serving as your home's interior designer and organizer. But to stay home to be the maid? C'mon. It's pretty humiliating in this day and age.

But housewifery is what takes up the bulk of my day. The running of a home is a colossal, constant unchecked "to do" list. There is always a chore to be done. I am as much housewife as mother. Right now, as a I write, the living room is covered in toys, the kitchen is full of dishes (and then there's that sticky place where Max spilled his juice this morning), a washer full of damp clothes to dry, and a list of errands that need running.

I just finished To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife by Caitlin Flanagan. And it speaks to this issue (although Ms. Flanagan speaks as one who has both housekeeper and nanny and a full-time stay-at-home dream job with paying writing gigs, so I took some of her words with a grain of salt.) I went looking for answers but didn't find many. It's a good book, though, and one that provacatively addresses these issues. In the chapter "Drudges and Celebrities" she writes:

There was a time when the measure of a home was found in the woman who ran it--who was there all day long, who understood that certain aspects of 'hominess' had less to do with spit and polish than with continuity and permanence. As these old standards wane, a new one has emerged, and it is [Martha] Stewart's...But almost any project she cooks up is less daunting than the one it is meant to replace: keeping a family together, under one roof, home.

Sometimes I feel caught between generations, between cultural shifts. I'm grateful for the women's rights movement of the 1970s, because it opened up a world of options I never would have dreamed of otherwise. I also feel a little defensive reading Betty Freidan, or some of the newer feminist writers, who make me feel that my life choices are somehow a smack in the face of feminism, a retreat. I also find myself at times getting a little cross-eyed with boredom in the world of stay-at-home mothers, wishing that sometimes we could find something to talk about besides our children. (Don't even get me started on those weird suburban "Moms Night Out" evenings I've been invited to involving houseware or makeup parties or worse, that weird Bunco game.)

I care about my family, passionately, and I refuse to apologize to anyone for that. I honestly believe it is important that my kids grow up with a readily available mom, and that if my husband is working 10-12 hours a day to give me that privilege, the least I can do is make things
neat and tidy and maybe have some semblence of a home-cooked meal on the table when he comes home at night. I have grown to appreciate the calm and peace that comes from a clean, well-ordered home, and I'm willing to scrub a toilet or two for that calm. Maybe when my kids are older, I'll say "to hell with all this" and jump into some new endeavor--and here is where I respectfully doff my hat to feminism, because without the activists of that movement, I might not have the option to do so. But I'm not going to apologize for being a housewife, either.

I have written before about Buddhist monks who create these beautifully-colored, intricate mandalas from sand, sometimes taking all day to do so, only to wipe it away and begin fresh the next day. In our society, a pointless exercise in futility. Yet to them the point is the activity--the meditative and spiritually open state that comes only through the banality and tedium of the task. I've seen this, too, in the writings of Catholic Benedictine monks who see an intrinsic link between their mundane tasks of keeping up the abbey and the cycles of their prayer. I believe my housework is my mandala, my liturgy of the hours. (At least, I believe this on my best days, when I'm not grumbling under my breath about the pointlessness and futility of it all.)

After all, my early immersion into punk rock taught me that just because something is considered right or wrong by societal norms does not in any fashion make that right or wrong. One hundred million people have been wrong before. So sue me--I'm a housewife. You got a problem with that?