The Making Of A Housewife

The happiest, sanest, most satisfying and comfortable time of my entire life was the period in which I left my feminist sisters to become a housewife. This was pre-baby. This was when it was just me and Philip living in our very first owned home together; a small late thirties simple cottage with a bizarre cottage cheese textured paint job, a chain link fence to hold in a posse of imaginary pit bulls, and a yard full of cement and gravel. The roses had been weed whacked into submission by the man we bought the house from (a Naval bachelor) and the ground had been liberally soaked in weed killer. The wood floors were smothered in pink, orange, and blue carpets and the kitchen cabinets were painted to resemble a giant fleshy band-aid.

It's amazing what can unfold from one's spirit when allowed the time and space to just be. To stop climbing the ladder of ambition and fortune; to shovel gravel until your back turns to cement and your husband must pick up your stiff body and prop it up in the living room at dusk so that you won't calcify amongst the roses; to grow your first vegetable garden not knowing a thing but letting the story unfold in your little pile of dirt chapter by chapter; strange and wonderful things can develop in an air full of possibilities.

Friends and acquaintances worried about the boredom that surely must arrive on the heels of not working for a wage. They worried about my sense of independence, my freedom as a modern woman to enslave myself to a boss. Without that, where would my source of pride come from? Where would my sense of accomplishment find purchase? How would I hold my head up against the feminist tribunal?

So far from turning to ash and dust, mired in an endless loop of drudgery and boredom, something rose up in me that had lain fallow for years, like a flock of caged doves being released in the atmosphere, it flushed my skin and touched the air and rooted in the dirt; my very own small patch of it. I found myself opening wide, hearing, for the first time, the mycorrhiza threads stretching for miles underneath my feet, I could taste more vividly the acrid cleansing of rosemary when added to soup and bread. I could feel the importance of our daily rituals of cleansing our homes and bodies; the daily rituals of cooking and growing things; the daily gathering of blossoms from exuberant plants to drape above our mantel; I came to understand that the real living of a life is in these daily rituals, not in our careers.

We work so we can eat. That is all. Let it be as stimulating and wonderful as it can be because lord knows many of us have to do it. But that's all it is. In the end, the real question of quality of life rests in how much care you or your spouse personally takes to make it taste good, smell good, feel comfortable, and give rest. If one person is home making it a place of beauty, of comfort, and is inhabiting the corners with spirit and love-you will always remember why you bust your ass working for wages. You bust it so you can come home and eat good food, enjoy your family, and bask in the falling light of dusk with your kingdom shining all around you.

Staying home gave me a freedom I never had before. The freedom to spend time at the library reading garden books. The freedom to take walks in mid morning for exercise. The freedom to clean my house without rushing through it on the week-ends. The freedom to learn to can jam. It gave me time. Precious time to develop life skills such as how to remove a thousand wild onion bulbs from one square yard of hard clay dirt in midsummer. Time to learn to grow my own herbs for cooking. Time to learn to arrange flowers to crown my mantel after cleaning my house. Time to write. To rip out carpet tacking. To learn to paint every room in my house in delicious colors. Time to meet my neighbors. Time to get to know the lonely old ladies around me. Time to breath. Time to feel good about what I had.

I had a laundry line at that house that I have missed. I'm going to put one up here too. The kind on wheels that lets you pull in your laundry. I discovered that roses can have intoxicating scent and can wrap themselves around your dreams. I found that working at home as a housewife made my self esteem a sturdier thing, it is the ideal job for my temperament. Home allows me to just be in ways that nowhere else does because everywhere else is too full of the noise of the world.

Perhaps it suits me because what pleases me most are simple things: fresh sheets on the bed, seedlings popping up in spring, fresh cut flowers from my own garden, a clean toilet, a pot of soup with a hunk of homemade bread, snipping fresh herbs outside my back door, letting time and thoughts slip sideways while weeding an impossible patch of dirt, hearing neighbors swear at the resident mocking bird, drinking beer on the back steps with Philip, chatting with passers by while pruning roses, talking to my garden, reading cook books in the quiet, making dinner at 4pm.

Becoming a housewife was one of the most surprising turn of events in my life. I never planned it. It started just as a break from careering. I was tired. I was tired and breaking down. I was staring down the mouth of an impending nervous breakdown and needed to stop. Just. Full. Stop. I never expected to find myself so full, so happy, and healing in the quiet. But why not? Why should it be such a surprise? Just because I'm a product of modern womanhood I have to thrive only on making money and getting accolades from strangers and people who pay me to do their bidding?

Hell no.

For right now I am doing some freelance work at home to help ease our financial situation, and I'm grateful for the opportunity that has come my way through a good friend, but I know that when need is clearly over, I will drop the work for others and resume my full time life as a modern housewife.

I don't use the word "housewife" to piss anyone off. In case you were wondering. I like it. I like saying it. I like breathing it. It has a grace and a power for me. I'm not a Stepford lady. I'm sloppy, loud, quirky, disorganized, and crazy, but I'm proud of my housewife skills anyway. I happen to also be a stay at home mom, but I don't enjoy saying that as much. It implies that if it weren't for my child I wouldn't stay home. It's like saying "I'm only home to be a better mom, NOT to be a better wife, homeowner, or person." As though staying home to be a homemaker were still a dirty ambition and means you don't care about equality for women.