SAHM

The House’s Wife


During the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation (a truly awful affront to die hard Trekkies in the opinion of my husband, and I whole-heartedly concur) there is an episode where Picard and his crew find themselves saddled with the descendants of a group of space colonists after their planet is threatened with solar flares. They come to discover that the expedition that founded this colony had a sister ship that was lost, leading Picard to search for them in hopes of finding a new home for these refugees who are now setting out to settle one of the Enterprise’s landing bays. His search leads them to a planet of clones, descendants, of sorts, of the missing second ship and it’s occupants. The clones are suffering from “replicative fading” and will die out without fresh DNA  infusions into their society which they try to unsuccessfully steal from the Enterprise crew. At the end of the episode, Picard unites the long separated groups after realizing that each can help the other with their problems. The first group  by “loaning” their DNA through reproduction, and the second by offering a new planet to settle on. What I remember the most about this episode is the scene at the very end when it is revealed that the women in both groups will have to engage in polygamous marriages in order to keep inbreeding at bay. Reverse polygamy by the way, not the kind that is so often forced upon females by religious groups as man and harem, but a woman with multiple husbands.

 

This episode came to mind when I was reviewing my present situation. I am a polygamist. I am Rob’s wife, and I am the house’s wife. I know for a fact that I find the former more satisfying than the latter. My relationship with Rob is a give and take, whereas the house takes. Oh, I know that some would argue the house gives too….in its own way. Shelter. Warmth. Safety. But does it have a choice really? What it takes in time, sweat, and Rob…. from me doesn’t make it’s contributions seem as great. In some ways, Rob is more of the house’s bitch than I am. Where it expects near constant cleaning from me, it demands structural upkeep from him that can be downright hazardous. Tonight for example he is replacing the back landing. Masonry needed to be removed as well as framing and floor. While the house passively observes, Rob saws and hammers, dodging exposed nails and his own efforts too judging from the ripped shirt and the bruised elbow he is confident will bring much by way of sympathy and consolation later on. Ah, to be known so well already.

 

I think the house suspects I don’t love it as much as I do Rob. It was an arranged marriage after all, not the love match Rob and I have. I guess it would be hard to live with the knowledge you will always be second best. Still I do my best to give the house what it needs. It should feel better knowing that I clean it more than I ever cleaned the last house I lived in. Truthfully, I have had a deep fondness for this place from the first night I walked in. Disorganized and in as much need of purging as where I was living at the time, it still said “home” to me and welcomed me. Ghosts and all, I knew I would love this place and I do. But like any polygamist, I have my favorite mate and the house will just have to learn to adjust.

Real Women


Caitlin Flanagan irritates me to my core. Last year she published a book, To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, which made her the darling of the nano-second with the Right Wing talking heads. Although it stops short of endorsing the shoeless, knocked up and slaving over a radiating microwave conservative mantra, it is a load of poser crap because as nearly as I can ascertain Ms. Flanagan is not, and never has been, a housewife. Her husband is filthy rich. She has a nanny and a housekeeper. She works. Okay, from home. But if the woman has a job that necessitates the need for a nanny and a housekeeper, them ain’t mother’s hours. 

This month she has a featured article in Oprah Magazine. I love O and I hate it. I love it because it provokes me and gives me good blog topics. I hate it because while it professes to be a tool for female empowerment, it completely buys into the same garbage about what being a woman is that all the other women’s magazines do. It is the deeper end of the self-help pool perhaps, but it isn’t helping because it makes the assumption that all the others do. If there is something wrong in your life from your relationship to your children to your job the root cause of this dysfunction is you, and though sometimes it is, a lot of the time it’s THEM. Anyway, the title of the article is You’re Middle-Aged. But Are You Done? Discuss. Oy! Where to begin with that! There are so many issues to be taken with the idea that 40 is some kind of huge mile-marker and that the decade that it kicks off is the precurser to Depends undergarments. Good lord, at 40 you still have a dozen or more years of tampons to buy. 40+ year old women are not near as wrinkly as the cosmetic industry would like us to believe (unless you smoke and were/are a tanning addict) and with a little bit of vigilance we can stave off the first bits of facial hair growth and graying. It’s not the wonder years of that the mid to late 30’s are but as Shrek says, “It’ll do.”

Flanagan yips a bit about not having the same drive or need to do and succeed that she did as a younger women and then wonders what her friends think about this decade of crisis. So, she fires up the old Rolodex and invites a few of her “average” friends over for party favors and wine and Q&A on the burning questions – marriage – money – sex and how this effects their ability to keeping dreaming about their lives and futures. Now, given who she is I didn’t expect her friends to be like mine. My best friends is a home health care nurse who is almost finished with her MSN despite having a full-time job, husband and two kids. Another very close friend is a middle school teacher whose husband is a farmer, her three girls are 22, 19, and 16 and has also just finished up her MA studies. Flanagan’s friends include a successful novelist, a performance artist, a television personality, a professional organizer , a temporarily retired entrepreneur, and she  throws in a SAHM as a bone for we merely ordinary women to relate with.

I truly went into the reading of this article with an open mind. I thought, “Hey, this is Oprah, right? She isn’t going to tolerate some vacuous shit. These women probably discuss some really important topics. The pressure on women to stay young looking and thin. The difficulties of juggling career and kids. Getting back into the workplace after taking time off. Being taken seriously in your profession.” Yeah, I was wrong, but I read on. And just made myself so crazy that I cornered my poor husband with a diatribe that lasted a good half-hour or so on how I would have answered this idiot woman’s questions. 

Although the entire article is not worth the paper it is printed on, there are a few topics that particularly galled me. One of them was sex. Not one of these women viewed sex with their husbands, or other significant mate, as important. It was an afterthought or worse, an inconvenience. One of them even quoted from a book entitled I’d Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido whose author actually told her husband that she was unilaterally scaling back the number of sexual interactions in their relationship, and what’s more incredible really…..he agreed with her. Furthermore the group on the whole was intrigued with the notion that instead of women visiting their doctors to get help with increasing their low libidos (I am assuming that the 40’s are a low point hormonally for many women …. though I don’t personally know any such women) men should see their physicians to see about decreasing their sex drives instead. Sex with one’s love is a chore? Granted, I was married for a goodly while to a man too ill to be intimate with in any way, but even if that wasn’t the case, I would still want to make love as often as possible with my husband. Sickness, exhaustion, child, selling a house, packing, moving to another country. None of these present any sort of insurmountable obstacle to passionate interactions and this I know for sure.

Another topic was money. Money spent wisely and money thrown away. Most of the participants discussed some purchase of clothing as the best investment they ever made and were thankfully shamed into silence by the women who said that the money she spent on fertility treatments was easily the best investment she ever made. When the discussion turned to money they thrown away, it was predictably things that they regretted splurging on like outfits of clothing, furniture, interior decorators. The money  that I regret spending is on the grave site and headstone I purchased for my late husband. $1300 that I really couldn’t afford, but I did it because he wanted to be buried somewhere that his family, mainly Katy and I, and his friends could come and visit. Sadly, Katy and I were the only ones to really visit his grave and had I not interred him I could have brought his ashes along to Canada with us. Now he lies alone in a little cemetery that it is unlikely I or his daughter will get back to for long while. Who knows really? Maybe even never. I regret that money a lot now.

I thought about conversations I have had with my friends about the state of health care and education. About the night my women’s writers group discussed the realities and ins and outs of dating and how one’s relationship history influences our choices and views. I suppose that “depth” is one of those eye of the beholder things, but I am irked that such a completely shallow person was given an opportunity to have a frank discussion and blew it so definitively. 

Finding My Way


Doing the stay at home mom thing was my part-time job over long holidays and during the summer. It was not something I took seriously, and I don’t say this to belittle it as an occupation. Raising a child and taking care of the basic and not so needs of a family is not for the lazy, the weak or the slow of mind. I base this observation on the years I spent, poorly, attempting to manage a household, child and a full-time job. None of which I managed to do well simultaneously and can say with all honesty that when push came to shove it was household that got the boot every time…..because it was hard work. Hard thankless unpaid work.

Yesterday I made my first trip into the Fort without Rob. Katy and I had an appointment for haircuts, and I needed to stop by the florist’s to touch base on arrangements for the wedding. I map-quested the directions and managed with only one misdirection. Today was another story. I need to go the library and the post office which ironically sit next to each other though the are accessible on opposite blocks. Library not a problem, but I had the wrong directions for the post office and being low on frustration tolerance still, I just gave up and went on to the next errand on the list. But, you know how after you have failed at something everything that come next takes on a slightly tinged with impending doom aura? 

Shopping is something that is becoming math-like for me. Despite my best intentions to block out all things American when it comes to money and other units of measurement, I find paying for things flustering. So much of the money here is in coin, and I really haven’t spent enough time looking at it to ascertain the values of the dizzying array of colors, shapes and sizes. So between monetary transactions and having to ask OnStar for directions to the post office, I felt quite like an idiot by the time I left town for home. The drive back is long enough that I was able to put some of the mood behind me and then happy conversation with Jordan over a lunch of leftovers banished the rest of the inadequacy fears, but I still feel a bit silly and think I should be catching on to this whole “being in a new country thing” a bit quicker.

It’s odd to feel as though you are right where you belong and like a fish our of water at the same time. I remind myself that I have accomplished some near Herculean things in the past couple of months, and it is normal to want to catch my breath a bit, but there is a part of me that has always met challenges and new things head on and  wants to charge right in and be perfect now.

As far as I have come, there are still things to do and places yet unknown. Patience not being a virtue of mine (something I actually pride myself on a bit at times), I know that I will have other moments like those today when I admitted defeat and called first Rob and then OnStar. It’s okay, I guess. Columbus probably asked for directions too. Well, maybe he didn’t. He was trying to find India after all. He could have used OnStar. They have turn by turn directions you know, but they can’t help with units of measurement thing.