The stay-at-home mother is considered maximally flexible. What could she possibly have going on? This total flexibility is quickly filled up with doctor’s appointments, children’s lessons, the need for everyone to eat all-day, every day, a friend’s children you will watch for an hour, a grandparent who needs a ride to the doctor’s office, a family with a new baby to whom you will bring a meal.
Approaching these obligations with clarity about our commitments ensures we do not wallow in agony at our self-sacrifice. If you don’t want to cook a meal, don’t. If you don’t want to attend an event or appointment, cancel it. Being a self-made martyr never helped anyone, least of all ourselves. But these activities are well worth considering.
All this “unpaid labor” that upsets activists so much is a quiet and efficient engine that makes great careers and functional communities possible. People who work intensely benefit greatly from the reprieve of home-cooked meals, freshly laundered sheets (occasionally, we are not talking about rigid regularity), and otherwise the comforts of hearth and home. The needy—young children, the ill, and the aged—require help.
A woman of 70 observed that when her grandmother was ill in her later years, her children took turns hosting her for a month or two before she moved to the next house. When the woman’s own mother suffered a stroke and required companionship and basic care around the clock, the woman and her five siblings considered if they could recreate what their grandmother had enjoyed in her final years: the steady company of those she loved. They could not. The reason? All the women worked. Oh, and the woman speaking was a nun, so she was obviously excused.
Housewives are a vital asset to any community. That said, it is still assumed that they are at home sleeping in and watching soap operas at any hour of the day or night. Not so for the even mildly competent woman who adopts this lifestyle.
This friction comes to light perhaps nowhere so glaringly as in scheduling servicemen. Some of them are utterly daft. No matter that there are shards of glass flying off the shattered glass any time anyone slams a door on the other side of the house and the duct-taped trash bags are fluttering in the breeze, you will hear nary a word from the repairman scheduled to come out days before. Large deliveries or complex installations? You may never hear if that will occur in the morning or afternoon. If you do hear, you’ll be given the gaping window of 8AM to 12 noon or 1PM to 5. So helpful.
C.S. Lewis might have observed, “The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only – and that is to support the ultimate career,” but it sure feels like the careerists did not receive the message.
As much as an “unemployed” housewife can feel righteous anger at the indignity of poor communication, it’s a wonder that any household in which everyone works full-time can ever get a window fixed or the plumbing problem looked at. The temptation to personalize and stew on perceived transgressions against oneself is brought to light by the stark realization that this is just how some servicemen treat everyone, and it has nothing to do with your station in life.
One receives compensation for these slights with the totally out of proportion extravagance of the young. A child will watch with rapt attention as you mix up a basic pasta meal on the stove that has become a family favorite. The child proclaims, “I’m going to write two songs after dinner. The first is, ‘Mom is the Best Cook I Know.’”
You know you’re mediocre in the kitchen and your cooking is nothing special. But to them it is the nourishment of daily life. Flavors that delight return and form a steady rhythm of meals and snacks that make up the ordinary days. To counterbalance the pain of being utterly ignored by a world that does not care, the family can be the place in which people are known and appreciated, extravagantly but nonetheless sincerely.
Here’s hoping the window will get fixed today, and I wonder what the other song was about.
