Shocking Abberation of Housewifely Solidarity

"A true friend stabs you in the front."
- Oscar Wilde

I have a very disloyal friend. Not long ago, on a rare child-free outing, I popped in to visit on the spur of the moment and without the slightest hint of forewarning. This is an important detail, because it means she had No Idea At All that I was coming.

As I arrived at her door, I could see her SITTING COMFORTABLY ON THE SOFA READING THE TIMES with an air of the utterly relaxed.

And it gets worse. She greeted me in the most delightful breeze of happy calm, and as I stepped into her kitchen, I immediately noticed three things.

Firstly, the house was utterly spotless and in gaspingly beautiful order. Secondly, it smelt of fresh bread. And thirdly, the children were Playing Quietly together upstairs.

No, no, nooooooooo! Bad, bad friend.

Since my entry into the world of mothers, I have seen various perplexing manifestations of people's ideas of "friendship", but I really do feel this breaks EVERY rule of female (and in particular housewifely) solidarity.

In future, lovely girl (and you know who you are) I expect mess. And not just any old mess, but fetid, reeking goblin mess, suggesting days of blatant sluttish neglect. I want you stressed and impatient, struggling in an important phone call with a finger jabbed in your free ear. I want the dog gnashing to go out and the children shrieking for biscuits, and all of them wiling away the wait by fighting voiciferously right at your feet, while you wildly gesticulate death threats, which they ignore. And finally, I do NOT want to smell fresh baking.

I wouldn't mind if I thought you'd faked it. But I can't believe that YOU, of all people, had craftily set the scene of carefully engineered perfection in the hope out-housewifing any unannounced callers. I just can't see YOU lying prettily arranged on the couch all morning, like frightful Lucetta waiting for Farfrae (am I right here? The Mayor Of Casterbridge was a long time ago) just to trump me in the housewife stakes. No, I think you were simply in a wonderful state of order and were genuinely enjoying a peaceful sit down in a gloriously clean, bread-smelling house.


It was a shoddy thing to do. Please be more careful as we are meant to be friends.

Mad Japan (apologies to I, Y and T)

I do love Japan, and nearly everything about it, and the fact that J and J have Japanese godparents is surely good testament to some wonderful Anglo-Japanese friendships we have collected over the years. I and Y in Tokyo are going to roll their eyes now though. Y once remarked, in response to one of R’s many gleeful emails sending links to yet more examples of Nippon nuttiness always to be found on the web, that we must spend our days LOOKING for weird stuff to send to THEM, stuff which no one over there would ever come across, or even recognise as “Japanese”. Sorry, Y-chan, but it IS fun. And I know you are going to sigh at me posting this link, but COME ON! How WEIRD is this?! I agree pretty much whole-heartedly with the argument for practical language training taking an emotional rather than academic approach, but this?

Mad Japanese language training video

It must be tongue-in-cheek, surely?

PS
Y and I, you are welcome to hit back and publish any examples of British lunacy. Our hapless PM might be a good place to start.

Starting off with North Korea

It's odd. Having waxed on about how having a blog was going to be my metaphorical window into the big, fascinating world AWAY from my housewifish life, the only thing I've written about so far IS about precisely that. And at rambling length too.

No more!

Would it be too strange, in this search for interesting things, to start with North Korea? (I've just asked R, who has responded, overly-patiently, "It's your blog, do what the hell you want.").

So, North Korea it is. I have been both intrigued and horrified by the little I know of this bizarre totalitarian state for some time. One can only imagine what it must be like to live under such massive daily constriction and golly, there are so many things I would dearly love to know. You hear so much about starvation, natural disasters, disasters through industrial accident and desperate economic mismanagement, that it's nigh on impossible to form any kind of picture at all.

During our years in Japan, there was constantly simmering hype about the place (unsurprisingly when one considers the North Koreans are not adverse to lobbing a few missiles over Japan for practice): for instance, we were often urged to be alert near the Weatern coast line because "North Korean's whizz across the Sea of Japan in magic submarines and snatch you back to spy". It is indeed no truer joke than it need be, as cases of kidnapped Japanese being forced into NK espionage are well-doucmented. However, I was never quite sure about the magic submarines.


Anyway, these photos by Eric Lafforque are indescribably fascinating. I now want to meet Mr Lafforque and bombard HIM with my uninformed questions, and even more, I want to go myself. When you follow the scant yet horrific reports which come out of North Korea, and try to create your own images, you cannot fail to be struck by the vibrancy or the beauty of these photos.


If anyone can tell me anything more about this country, I would be massively eager to listen. I would also like a North Korean friend but I imagine that might be harder to organise.

AFTERTHOUGHT
I was living in Japan when Kim Il Sung died in '94 and was utterly confounded by the endless footage of small children, young soldiers and middle aged workes alike, all howling hysterically and banging their heads in what seemed inconceivable outpouring of public grief. Let alone the newscasters sobbing through their broadcasts announcements.



Ok, it's not actually a giggle to watch but I DO think it's worth seeing, if only to digest, for a sobering second, how different other people' s lives can be. Fascinating and frightening at the same time.

The Making of WINOS

WINOS – HERE WE GO...

THE BACKGROUND

A couple of months back, I got this "Motivational Traing for Women" speaker to come and talk to us. A friend had taken one of her courses and raved eyes-a-shiningly about it. Secretly, of course, I hoped it would also be My Key to a new inspired life, leading to actual fulfilment of all those good intentions paving my road to hell... I emailed around; if anyone else had been feeling a tad lethargic recently, then come along, half-expecting either to amuse or inadvertently insult. Surprisingly, hoards emailed back, straight away, saying that’s exactly how they felt and they would be there.

It was a surprise, first, and a relief, second. “You are not alone” and all that.

The evening was...odd. I’ve always been beastily superior about self-help (without, of course, any personal experience and therefore any right at all to deride) and for me at least, the evening met all my worst expectations. Our speaker was strangely dressed, overly sing-song and her all-us-girls-together style was distinctly chafing. The details of what turned out to be a blatant two hour sales-pitch do not merit recording, but at one point the she gave us all paper bags and a conspiratorial wink, and told us to write down on lots of little pieces of paper “all the lovely things we thought about ourselves”.

Hey? Surely the whole POINT of being a housewifing mother with a few births behind you, AND at the far end of your thirties, is that you now have the right NOT to think anything lovely about yourself at all?

Most of us sat and looked and giggled and wrote nothing. It was a very awkward five minutes. And at the end of it, our speaker said, with evident self-congratulation “And NOW ladies, put this in your bag and carry it everywhere. Everywhere! You... now... all... have... (pause for imaginary drum roll…) Bags Of Confidence!”

We must have all looked a bit dumbfounded because she certainly let irritation slip through her wink-wink joviality. Change to especially patient voice. “What you DO, ladies, is use that bag to give you a bit of a boost when you’re feeling a little bit low. You get it out and read it and then” (hissed near-menacingly) "You WILL feel BETTER".

Hmm. This kind of stuff doesn’t work for me but, to be polite, I am sure is a very valid exercise for some and therefore I don’t mean to disparage unnecessarily. In any case, the single bit of paper I’d manage, after much internal wrangling said “Good at piano” to which I had then added “quite” and a question mark. Which wouldn’t give me a boost at all, because were I to follow this practice, my reaction would then be “And you can’t even play the piano any more, you dull lunk.”

SO ENTER WINOS

But we did all go to the pub. And that’s when it all became fun. We had already, by our attendance, tacitly admitted to a mutual lack of motivation. But we decided, straight out, that we were not going to pay several hundred pounds each for a Strange Lady and an evening writing on little slips of paper.

However, there it was: there are a lot of us around, mothers, working or not, all with very little time to ourselves at the end of the day. And something seems to have slipped. We couldn't put our collective finger on it that night but we’re all feeling a little bit, well, flimsy. Apathetic, maybe? Tired, definitely. A little bit lacking in SOMETHING. None of us there were unhappy with our lot, and we are all REALLY grateful for where we are. BUT something definitely lacks. L says that her mojo has mosied and I’m inclined to feel the same. Have we morphed into an extension of our families, just a little bit? And why this sudden lack of self-confidence?

So, this is our attempt at a comeback. Every month or so, we will get together in a very non self-help way, and DO something; even, LEARN something. Something that we wouldn’t otherwise do, something, most importantly unrelated to kids and houses and husbands. Something that will force some of the stunning talents hanging around to be dusted down and put to use again.

It is not intended to be, in any twee sense, a little night out for the ladies. Nor must it be one of the horrific socials for women whose idea of female solidarity is to shriek along to I Will Survive after bottles of chardonnay. We can all sense, I think, that there is much irony in the mere idea, but that can surely be part of the fun. And if this all sounds far too joyful and WI for words, well, that’s probably because it’s exactly what it is, with less Jerusalem.

As for what we can do, I think the floor is open. Suggestions so far have included sword fighting, cookery, African dance, and laugh-yoga. Or we might just sit in the pub. But at least, we'll be doing something.

C, who is very sharp and very funny (and very beautiful and should have had her little paper bag over-flowing that night, but I BET she came over all self-deprecating and wrote nothing), came up with the name.

WINOS. Women In Need….Of Something. Its dainty link to another of our self-proclaimed favourite past times is purely a happy and poetic coincidence. What's more, the use of the word “something” means, delightfully, we don’t have to analyse ourselves any further and decide just what the hell it is we want. And that we can be as serious or as tongue-in-cheek about it as we like. Clever, C, you really are.


So. KH (fortified with the confidence of the truly talented; just check out www.thissideupcartoons.com ) is running our first one: an evening on how to sketch. Fabulous! Personally speaking, I have never sketched anything in my life and can't draw for the proverbial toffee but who knows where this might lead?

It ain' t housework and that's good enough for me.

New WINOS members always welcome if any of the above attracts.

Why it's Hard to be a Housewife

'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.



!

Hmm. I'm not very au fait with this blogging lark and appear to have joined my own blog.
I imagine that is Not Very Cool. But I don't know how to undo it. Hohum.

How on earth do you start a blog?

How on earth do you start a blog? I've been defiantly procrastinating for weeks and getting nowhere. I think I’m finding it difficult to be honest about why I really want this blog project, and R has assured me if I’m not going to be honest, there’s little point in doing it at all. (And I have to trust him, as Web Geek to my ignorance).

Soooooo, taking the proverbial bull by the horns, I’m doing it because I’m a bit bored. (If this were a self-help group, people would clap now…) I’m just a bit bored. Mentally, not time-wise. Time-wise, I’m utterly flat-out busy, most of the time, but my brain, like much of me these days, is rather under-exercised, and dulled by repetitive housewifely chores and the general mayhem of multitasking motherhood.

I really need to give it something to think about. I need to force it to ponder things other than Small Children And Housework becaaauuussse… if I don’t , my brain and I are going to spiral into the very pits of housewifely vacuity and in a few months time I’ll be smiling blandly and not knowing where Venezuela is.* We may speak of Nappy Brain in mock-horror tones, and as a concept it might very well sound amusing, but I’ve been doing this for four years and, for me, it is a real and present menace lurking just around the corner.

Hence all this. R has been very good in his assaults on my procrastination. Probably the biggest reason for my nerves is simply that I am pretty sure I have little of interest to say. But then, as he pointed out, with unusually kind reassurance, this could be a way of forcing myself to rectify that, in my own mind at least. I suppose, in any case, lots of people have Nothing To Say, but still manage to say it with surprising loquacity. My second worry was that it could all be just a bit self-indulgent, a mere extension of vanity publishing, which again he has deftly rebutted with refreshingly male “So bloody what?”. I do suppose, then, if you’re not actually forcing anyone to read your blog, it doesn’t really matter. But it’s taken a while to get here.

So why else then? Well, I really do worry that motherhood (much as I have honestly come to love it) is making me a bit thick. And while I can sulkily reconcile myself with the fact that I going to get older, fatter, wrinklier, whatever, I do NOT want to get thicker, not ever.

Therefore, for me, trying to maintain a blog is all about reclaiming the tiniest bit of sanity as I used to know it.; about some kind of regular cerebral stimulation in the very few minutes of quiet anyone can hope for when living with perpetual-motion pre-schoolers. And maybe this will propel me towards some of all the fascinating stuff out there which I always seem to put after the daily mundanity and then never look at.

So. Six Seconds Of Sanity. Lets see, shall we?

* Note to R: before you get gleeful, I DO know where Venezuela is, thank you, I do have an opinion on Chavez and I could even give a good stab at its GDP, at the moment - I’m just talking about what MIGHT happen, soon. Just as an example. I know what you were thinking…