Our house is generally clean and neat, but I know it’s in need of certain attentions: Hand-me-downs lurk in a closet, waiting to be sorted and tried on. The kitchen longs for reorganization. The playroom toys pine to be sorted through and rotated. The checkbook screams to be balanced; the computers groan for an operating system upgrade. And a lot of stuff in the garage is whispering that it wants to be donated or given away.
Generally speaking, I’m an industrious person—the kind who knows how long everything in the fridge has been there and cooked most of it from scratch. I’m good enough at managing my time that I could find a few minutes here or there to tackle big projects in small pieces. So why don’t I?
Well, because I hate to. In my best moments, I attribute my lack of interest to “proper priorities”—i.e. I prefer tenderly parenting my two recently adopted kids; helping my marriage weather the huge change of children; maintaining a shadow of my former professional life. But in my worst moments, I call myself a bad wife and mother because I just don’t like keeping house. My guilty secret is that I often dream nights about the small, bright, clean, neat apartment I had when I was single, before my life got so complicated that household management became a job of its own.
Our son M and daughter K, age 4 and 5, observe me, of course. For their sake, I don’t want to look discontented: I want them to believe that their mom is happy so they won’t fear I’ll “send them back.” The problem is, I don’t want them to grow up believing all women are fulfilled as homemakers. To complicate matters, Peter and I do pay a few people for their services keeping our home: someone who supplements the cleaning I do; someone else who mows the lawn. I don’t want the kids to grow up believing these are “somebody else’s” jobs that aren’t worth learning, so I wish we were doing everything ourselves. However, since Peter works impossible hours, I’d have to do it all, and I just hate to.
Any other readers: How have you tackled this problem?
Photo graciously provided by yashrg, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved.
1 response so far ↓
Jill in Atlanta // May 14, 2008 at 2:48 pm
I make a point to explain that we pay money for someone to clean our home. She pays money for someone to sell her food. They pay money for someone to program their cash registers (Daddy). The circles are sometimes very contrived, but I want them to understand that everyone works hard to earn money for their family. We pay, we earn. When we go to the ATM machine, I always explain that the bank has been keeping our money safe and now I’m going to get some of it to use.
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