'You sometimes see a woman who would have made a Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces over all the mean worry of housekeeping.' Rudyard Kipling Plain Tales of the Hills (1888)
So, I am officially a housewife and a very underachieving one. My mess is a house, constantly littered with gleeful examples of my imperfections. Even after four years of doing this mostly Full Time, I can’t help but approach housework with vicious, resentful snootiness and there are some absolute common basics that I can’t quite seem to grasp. Like the fact that what you do does NOT remain 'done' for ages. All this time in and I still feel genuine insult when things need doing again the next day.
My mum, having fashioned her craft in the perfect homeliness of the 1950s, was excellent at it all and could have taught me lots if I hadn’t been too busy making a smirkingly overconfident point of Not Needing To Listen. (It has occurred to me that another of the very many sad points about her not being here any more is that she was deprived of the chance to tell me how She HAD Tried and I WOULDN’T Listen, which I think she would have, quite rightfully, rather enjoyed.)
My housewifing friends (delightful, kindred souls, the lot of them) and I talked it over recently, on one rare and spontaneous evening in the pub. This is, I think, pretty much what we have decided:
Once upon a time, the idea of ever becoming a “housewife”, of shunning career and financial independence and of concentrating on Children and Chores was completely, utterly unthinkable. I think we all get that much of this was down to the naivety of youth (at the same stage we were all going to become High Court Judges). But if anyone had told us, ambitious teenagers as we were, that we would, in the future, become stay-at-home mothers who would do all the housework, we would have sprinted.
The Housewife Ideal, for us, was something firmly padlocked into an ethereal era of aprons and patience for husbands – which, now I think about it, can’t have been in the least bit real, can it? Anyway, it was a Concept Gone By, something we never ever thought would come back to trouble us. None of our teachers, sensibly no doubt, ever even attempted to prepare us To Keep House, and I can't believe we would have reacted in any kind of seriousness if they had. And if our Mums ever mentioned it, we switched off and enthusiastically filled in UCCA forms with plans of female greatness that did not include mops.
Moreover, there was all that 1980s assertive power-woman-big-shoulders thing going on, which was actually strangely compelling, (and more convincing than the whole girl-power thing a decade later, which seemed to mean little more than wearing hotpants and doing scary kicks all over the place). And probably most importantly, we all went through our Beauvoir phase with a dutiful dabbling in feminist literature which inspired a trusting belief in gender egalitarianism, at the very least.
Put all this together, we decided that evening in the pub, and it really did leave us with a developed , if unjustifiable, sense of disdain for Her-at-Home. And, even if we have all chosen to be just that, this mean old sense of disdain has proved rather tricky to dissolve. So is it any wonder we approach all life as a housewife with a certain disinclination?
'My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.'
Erma Bombeck
We agree on this: we all made the decision, we all appreciate having the choice to make in the first place, and we all had absolutely no idea what we were letting ourselves in for. It’s not that it’s particularly hard, especially in comparison to how some people have to live their lives. It’s also not that we fail to appreciate that we were fortunate to have a choice in the first place. If you try and talk about this honestly, it’s very easy to sound ungrateful and we aren’t. But I think it’s more that we had all, deep-down, expected that doing the stay-at-home mother thing to be a bit of a doddle which we would sail through with perfection. And now we’re all rather surprised that a) it’s not and b) we don’t.
I wonder, for rather a lot of the time, if those of us at home with small children don’t feel like we are going ever-so-quietly, ever-so-slightly mad.
'Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.'
Phyllis Diller, Phyllis Diller's Housekeeping Hints, 1966
I shouldn’t speak for the others, but, for my part, I didn’t make the transition from Working to Stay-At-Home particularly seemlessly. Firstly, I was totally unprepared for Housewifery and stunningly incompetent at managing the basics. At first, I really did try. I scrubbed and folded and used Ironing Water, and dedicated time to Fresh Baking Smells for Visitors. Of course it didn't work at all, and at the end of a day of it, I was truly knackered and totally disenchanted. What’s more, come 7pm, I also found myself with a growing Pavlovian response to that nightly CBEEBIES warble (the one about how the time has come to say good night, if you know it), and this was an unruly reflex which sent me whizzing off for wine by the second line of the song. The Japanese have a phrase “kitchen drinker” to refer to bored housewives who turn to drink, and, although I stop short of alcoholism, (surely?!) I can kind of see their point.
The first and biggest problem was (is) reconciling all of the above with what I had been doing before. Namely, studying and working. It’s horribly hard to switch off the picture of yourself, however vaulted, as ”independent” and “successful” and just Clean That Floor Again. Moreover, for myself at least, to be completely sewn in to the necessary but unrelenting timetables of 2 babies and a dog, felt, in selfish moments, almost like a personal affront. There comes a time where you realise how long you have spent tidying the laundry and you don’t, and can’t, recognise yourself. "Why on earth did I study to do THIS?" is a question which has presented itself, petulantly, many, many times.
Going back to our chat in the pub though, one thing we have all found hard has been reappraising our fundamental idea of equality. Yes, of course, it does make absolute sense that part of your daily agenda as the one who Stays At Home also means getting a meal on the table for the family and doing the laundry – and I think we all accept that, I really do - but this can easily translate, in the midst of a bored, bad and belligerent mood, as Cooking His Bloody Supper And Washing His Sodding Socks. We found that the chasm that then appears between your life and that of your beloved husband (which pretty much continues as before, whatever you say, R) is very hard not to resent. On this, we decided – it’s not so much that we weren’t prepared for all this, it’s more that we had spent a lot of time being very deliberately NOT prepared to do any of it. We were, and are, happily and fundamentally conditioned against it all. How to break through that?
As far as I was concerned, it just took a while to realise that the central problem of my bad housewife skills was not actually latent inability – it was a failure to understand that a Perfect House would never be the summit of my daily ambition. Learning to live withmy glaring imperfections was all part of the battle. Now I oscillate somewhere between the two extremes, without minding very much any more, although, ok, batey moments still remain. And it does get easier, though whether that is down to better household management or caring less I couldn’t honestly say.
'Housework is something you do that nobody notices until you don't do it.'
Anon
And finally. I feel quite guilty saying it, buuutttttt…when your main task is to run a house and care for the inmates, your head is full of things to remember but your BRAIN actually has very little to do. I feel like my own brain, over the past four years, has been emptying in a drip-drip-drip fashion. And I know I’m not alone in this. In fact, we're actually specifically doing something about this in the formation of WINOS, more on which here later I'm sure...Golly, though, it does help to know other people have been flailing as wildly as I have. Thank goodness for the veritas of pub vino, hey.
PS
1. Yikes! This is FAR too long for a post, I am sure. I look back, and gosh, I really have been blathering on. The self-indulgence I have avowed to avoid is already creeping in... But, seriously though , since all of this has been simmering away somewhat chaotically for rather a while, it's been rather cathartic having to sort it out in words. I doubt it will make sense to anyone but me, and probably by tomorrow it won't make sense to me either, but, as I said, I do feel better.
Shall I have a glass of wine? No. It's Tuesday. Bugger.
!
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