The Joyful Housewife

You know me - I believe life is not a race - so I think you’ll forgive me for posting my Marriage Monday reflection on Tuesday. I’m so determined start a dialogue about marriage that I’m committed to attempting a weekly post about it.

I just….haven’t been able to do it regularly yet.

This week, I’ve been reading Flux, by Peggy Orenstein and I came upon a paragraph that mirrors feelings I’ve had about my husband that I hadn’t been able to put into words. The emphases are mine.

As I turned back to my computer screen, Steven came in, bearing a bowl of udon, a kind of Japanese noodle soup, for my lunch. He set it down beside me, then quietly left the room. It was a small gesture, but I realized that in our relationship, those gestures were usually his. He was the one who worked the garden, who cooked, who found special things to display on the walls. He had made our home a sanctuary. It occurred to me that he was the kind of person I wished I were: the kind who could be accomplished in the outside world yet create a cozy environment at home without either role threatening the other. He had found the balance that I lacked. The longer I was married to Steven, the more I appreciated what he brought to our relationship. Ironically some of his strengths are those most associated with women. Through him I was slowly learning that I could have connection without submission, domesticity without a betrayal of self. Those lessons did not come easily to a woman whose feminism was built on the primacy of autonomy and achievement, who saw any step toward traditional spheres of femininity as backsliding. I write about women, but it took a man to teach me this.

Wow! This blew me away. I feel so fortunate to have met a man who is as unconventional as I am. Just as I’ve not been overly comfortable discussing certain “women’s topics” such as purses and shoes, he’s never been really comfortable talking sports. I remember him telling me in the beginning that he didn’t believe in traditional gender stereotypes (Boy, did I score when I met him!) and I’ve been well aware that knowing him has changed me, but I didn’t realize that his nurturing actions could have so profound an effect on my perception of myself as a woman.

Like Peggy, I grew up thinking that “any step toward traditional spheres of femininity as backsliding.” For much of my life I saw taking too much of an interest in such things as cooking and sewing as moving away from my opportunity to reach my potential. I grew up with the belief that I could and should “do anything” (that is, anything that wasn’t traditionally “women’s work”). I rejected the idea that I should sacrifice myself for a husband and children.

I think I’ve developed this blog as a way to address my ambiguity about these issues. I’m obsessed with the idea of the housewife - how I’ve never wanted to be one - how I’m beginning to question what it actually means to be one in the 21st century, now that women are no longer stuck “inside,” but are always connected to the rest of the world through the internet, continually networking and creating new definitions of “work.”

My husband’s generosity and care for me reminds me that caring for a family and making my home a sanctuary from the outside world is pretty much what gives my life meaning. Work is important in my life, and it has brought feelings of accomplishment and confidence that nothing else has, but it doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive of settling into domestic life with my life partner and future children.

The fact that my husband - a very accomplished man - can cook, buy plants for the house, be the one who remembers to water said plants, garden, and get excited about buying a vintage rug for the living room, proves that I can do such things without giving another thought to what it says about my gender or my potential to be “successful” in this world. Cooking for my husband (and myself) or packing his lunch, does not undermine my autonomy or my or my ability to “be accomplished” outside the home.

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In my fight against clutter, I’ve begun with my emotions. As I mentioned a couple of posts ago when I began my Clutter Kick Campaign, CLA (Clutterers Anonymous) asserts that there are three components to cluttering: physical, emotional, and spiritual.

Which brings me to last night. As you may know, I’ve been trying my darndest to make positive changes in my life. I’m trying to kick bad habits and replace them with good ones. But yesterday evening I was feeling particularly down. I was in a state where I was creeping closer and closer to tears, and really, really, really, wanted to lay on the couch and order take-out rather than cook dinner. I was dangerously close to wallowing in Do-Nothingism.

What is Do-Nothingism? It is the odious state in which you feel so bad you can’t bring yourself to enjoy or do anything - it is procrastination’s nefarious cousin. David D. Burns, M.D. wrote a very influential book that I’ve been reading this week, called Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. Dr. Burns and his colleague, Dr. Aaron T. Beck, are pioneers of the revolution in therapy that is Cognitive Behavior Therapy. They discovered, through much documented research, that there is an undeniable connection between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and that you can improve your mood by improving either your thoughts or your behaviors.

Dr. Burns has worked throughout his career with severely depressed patients who can’t even bring themselves to get out of bed. In his books, he demonstrates techniques for combating this severe form of doing nothing, which tends to lead you on a downward spiral of depression. He has proven that doing nearly anything at all will undoubtedly make you feel better than not!

So, I decided to take Dr. Burn’s advice and Do Something - Anything! I went to the store and bought a few ingredients to make a stew from The Eat-Clean Diet Recharged.

Simultaneously, I examined my thoughts:

“I hate cooking.”

“Cooking is hard.”

“Life is hard.”

While chopping the potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, and brussels sprouts, I marveled at how easy this was. If broken down into components, cooking is really just a series of very easy steps! Right? And, though I felt fatigued and wanted to curl up in the fetal position and eat ice cream, I couldn’t deny that the closer my stew came to being finished, the better I felt. I mean, I was still very, very tired, but now I had a delicious stew to nourish that tired body!!! Score!

In the end, I had one of the best stews I have ever made, which I will absolutely make again. In fact, I’m certain that I will make it often enough to do so without a recipe.

Now I do feel better than I would have if I’d done nothing. I feel pride that I served my husband and myself a delicious meal (and this on the night before he had to take his Step 3 Medical Licensing Exam).

And if you want to make this delicious stew, it is really easy:

I used four organic russet potatoes, three large organic carrots, one onion, three cloves of garlic, and eight brussels sprouts, all chopped. I sauteed these until they were tender while boiling a cup of French lentils in a separate pot.

Then I added a magical combination of spices:

1 teaspoon each of turmeric, cumin, ginger, and coriander, 1/2 teaspoon of allspice, and a dash of cayenne.

Once mixed in, I added four cups of low-sodium veggie broth, sea salt, and the lentils. I let it simmer until it tasted ready to eat!

So, the next time you are feeling like wallowing in do-nothingism, remember that actions can change both your thoughts and your feelings. I believe that this observation is so incredibly life-changing, that I made this handy little diagram for you to picture when you’re feeling down. Cheers!

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My sister sent this to me. She’s a mom of four and can no doubt relate to this on levels that I can’t. But, I think it’s pretty darn funny. It’s pretty good for a laugh on a Sunday night. Actually, you’ve probably seen some of the short versions of this if you’ve been watching the olympics, but this version is better.

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It’s been abut six months since I received my Clutterer’s Anonymous Starter Kit and I finally opened it up yesterday read through the materials, and put each page in a separate sheet protector in a new binder. I ordered the kit for $15 because there are no face-to-face meetings here in Denver and I thought I might start one myself. Hoarding has been in the news a lot lately, and we’ve been struggling with it personally, in my family. I’m trying to decide whether I have enough time to try to start a CLA group here in Denver before my husband and I move for his job. I’d like to spread the network of support. I think fellowship for people with similar problems has the potential to be very helpful.

After I went through the material, I called my mom and had a circuitous, roller-coaster-of-emotion conversation, that began and ended well. She is exhausted from our recent trip out there (in which we sorted through unbelievable amounts of stuff) and she is quite depressed. (I also suffer from bouts of depression and am suffering from my own mishap this week, in which I accidentally took my sleeping pill for two days instead of one of my antidepressants! Doh!)

The issue that made our phone conversation so difficult yesterday was as follows: Mom was able to accept the label of hoarder for a time, but now it makes her feel very bad. Strangely enough, it was she who first labeled herself as a hoarder! I remember speaking to her on the phone a couple of years ago when she pointed me towards a Compulsive Hoarding website and some articles.  But, it is difficult to find a balance between giving a problem a name so that you can treat it, and giving it a label which is counter productive. I think with all of the current publicity about hoarding, she doesn’t want to be seen, even in her own eyes, as being like those people on tv.

Don’t be mislead by my somber tone! I’m very excited about the possibility of starting a new CLA group in Denver and I am quite grateful for the time that we have been able to spend together working on mom’s storage units and talking about our hopes for her future. It’s just that the issue of dealing with hoarding, or with a recovering hoarder, is complicated for a family and it is a constant struggle for everyone in the family to reach common ground on this issue. There is no one right way to do it, and what is acceptable one day is not going to work on another day.

So I’m trying to move more in the direction of talking about chronic disorganization and excessive cluttering. Cluttering which is out of one’s control and has a negative affect on one’s life, possibly interfering with use of certain areas of the home. CLA is a 12 step program, modeled after AA, and is not for everyone. My mom does not find it helpful. I might give it a try though.

Oh, and as for the title of this post - I truly believe that Life is not a race!!! It may have taken me a long time to finish my education, to get married, to have kids (haven’t actually done that yet), to start a “career” (nor have I actually done that), to open the CLA packet, but what is the hurry? Life is the process, not the product. I like who I am and where I am right now. I don’t need to have “accomplished” more than I have, or to have reached any milestones quicker than I have.

This is especially true with getting control of chronic disorganization or compulsive hoarding. Some family members just want to throw out a lot of mom’s stuff without sorting through it, but if we race through the process, we won’t have lasting results. There needs to be an inner change as well as an outer one.

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We are back from helping my mom, resuming our normal workaday lives. I have lots to say about the hoard-busting process - much of it not yet processed in my own brain yet though.

As I’ve said before, my mom has a bit of a hoarding problem. She has several storage units and garages filled with piles of intermixed stuff that we are trying to get rid of so that she can live a functional life. We set up a triage to sort through as much as we could in one week and managed to get rid of 80-90% of what we went through. The problem is that for various reasons, (e.g., her having to move quickly without help over a decade ago, chronic disorganization, etc….) the stuff is all mixed up. There are books, clothing, magazines, knick-knacks, baby clothes, childhood toys, dishes, and anything else you can imagine, all mixed together in each box.

Our goal was to toss, send to Goodwill, or auction most of the stuff, while getting out any childhood treasures or pictures that each of us daughters (or mom) wanted to keep - saying goodbye to the rest.

The above picture is of my Holly Hobby doll that mom gave me when I was five and home from kindergarten with the chicken pox. I have strong memories of it because it was almost as tall as me and I loved it! It was something that I was hoping to find. After doing so, I walked around our sorting area, hugging it for about five minutes, got pics of me holding it, then took pics of it in the Goodwill pile and said goodbye.

So, goodbye, Holly Hobby! You are fondly remembered, but we don’t need to keep you anymore.

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I was thrilled to find this weekly meme on Blissfully Domestic and couldn’t wait to join in myself. My older sister said something right before I got married that has really stuck with me. She said she hates it when she gets together with women and all they want to do is criticize their husbands. She says whenever that happens, she leaves the room.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t ever discuss things that our husbands do to upset us (with our closest friends) because no two people can go forever without having arguments, and talking is part of healthy problem solving, but I do think the culture of man-bashing is crap.

Hence, my love of this meme!

So why is my husband so great? He works his butt off and is providing me a life in which I’ll be able to stay home with my kids when they’re young. He does this even though sometimes he fears that work is sucking his soul away. He could be hopping from job to job, or barely holding one, but he’s responsible, even when it’s tough to hang in there.

It isn’t necessarily a fair deal. I will get to be home and organize my day the way I want to (don’t get me wrong, I know it ain’t easy being a SAHM, but I do know that when I’m at the park with my kids on a sunny spring day and he’s stuck in a gloomy hospital, he’ll be envious of my freedom) and I’ll get to be there for all joyful moments of watching my babies grow. And when I do work at various times in my life, as I am right now, I have the option to work part-time because we don’t rely on the money I make. Because of this, I get to choose work that I find fulfilling instead of doing it out of necessity.

My husband is a good man and I’m lucky to have met him!

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It happens to most of us, our husbands just can’t seem to get undressed without leaving their clothes right there on the floor. Socks, underwear, jeans, shirts. Mostly socks. Yes, mostly socks. What do you do about it? Do you nag him continuously, or do you pick them up? Do you pick them up without thinking twice about it, or do you stew and curse him in your mind, starting yet another mental list of everything he does wrong?

I’ve said it before, marriage came suddenly and surprisingly into my life, and if I could do it over again, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m not saying that everyone should wait until at least their late 20s to get married, but it worked well for me. It was necessary for me to mature and get through some of my own issues before I could be a partner to my husband.

One of the things I did was pick up a book called Loving What Is, by a woman named Byron Katie (that is her first and middle name, she dropped the surname). It’s not important to me if you check out that book or not, it’s falls into the category of Self-Help, and I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve occasionally read self-help books, but I am who I am.

Anyway, what was perhaps most important was the lesson I learned from Katie’s epiphany. She was a very depressed woman who had hit rock bottom, and then woke up one day a changed woman. I won’t go into all of that here, but the end result is that (1) she stopped trying to manage anyone’s business but her own, and (2) she stopped hating what couldn’t be controlled by her.

This manifested in various ways. She one day realized that it was futile to hate the wind in the dessert she lived in. If she hates wind she should move otherwise she should learn to love it, like it, or at least be indifferent to it.

The more important realization is one that has stuck in my head ever since. She used to nag her teenage kids every single day about picking up their socks and other messes in their own bedrooms, and then one day she realized, she had a choice in the matter. She could nag her kids every single day and make everyone, including herself miserable, or she could take two seconds and pick up the socks herself!

Wow! From that point on I vowed never to allow my husband’s socks, underwear, and jeans on the bedroom floor to bother me. We are literally talking seconds that it takes for me to pick up the socks, because it is me who is bothered by them. He obviously doesn’t care or he wouldn’t leave them there. There is a part of his brain that is utterly oblivious to socks on the floor. There is a part of my brain that finds it ugly and yucky. I am bothered by it and I’m a grown woman, so the logical thing to do is pick them up and not even mention it to my husband. This allows me to go about my business, completely forget about it, and greet my husband later in the day with love instead of resentment.

What do you all think? I know there are a lot of women out there who disagree with me, who love to hold longtime grudges against every little infraction their husband makes. I challenge you to defend your ways to me. Can you actually provide reasons why that is better than just picking up the socks yourself?

(And please note, this has nothing to do with leaving the toilet seat up. That is NOT okay.)

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Whenever I hear stories about women being kicked out of stores for breastfeeding in public I get really peeved, mostly because these women are often being very discreet and not even showing any skin anyway  - horror of horrors - you see more boob on TV commercials and billboards than you will see from any nursing mom.

So I really enjoyed reading Crunchy Domestic Goddess’ in depth coverage of a recent incident of discrimination against a breastfeeding mom in a Target store. I applaud her for writing her own letter to Target - the more vocal we lactivists are about breastfeeding, the less often these incidents will occur.

Also, there is a a new group on Facebook which is protesting the removal of breastfeeding pictures, called Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene! (Official petition to Facebook).

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A Date With Your Family!

I found this scary, but funny, 1950s education film via and article called 5 Tips For Dating Your Family. It’s worth a glance even if you don’t have time to watch the whole thing.

And if you’d like even more comedy about the squirmy thought of being on a date with your family, click on the article link, read the five tips, and then scroll down to the bottom to read the readers comments, such as:

“I broke all these rules. Yesterday after dinner my mom talked about pregnant teenagers or something, so I drunkenly yelled “DON’T PEOPLE GET ABORTIONS ANYMORE!?”

Silence.

Glare of death from my VERY catholic grandmother.”

~femme-bot

and:

“I don’t want to belong to my family, never mind date them.”

~PaintedTrollop

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One habit I’ve developed since I’ve been married is honest communication in the moment. I’ve learning not to hold on to negative feelings over something that I could have solved immediately.

For example, I’ve been really interested in cluttering-hoarding since we’ve gone out to help my mom last month. While there we found out that there is a group called Clutterer’s Anonymous, which works on extreme cluttering problems with an adapted version of the twelve steps from AA. I’ve been bummed that there are not meetings in the city I live in, but was encouraged by the California group to start my own. All it takes is $15 to get a packet which explains how to get members and hold meetings.

So when my husband and I went out to dinner at the close of a long and hard month for both of us, I told him about what a great experience it was going to the CLA meeting. When he asked if I’m thinking about going to one here, I informed him that there aren’t any, but that I’m considering starting my own.

And what was his response? “Are you sure you can handle that?”

At this point an old me may have shut down, gotten pouty and teary, and would not have been able to hold a conversation for the rest of dinner, etc.

Instead I didn’t feel bad at all, I said, “Hey now, it’s not your job to tell me I can’t do something, but to encourage me and be my cheerleader!” I added, “I know that you only say that because you care for me and don’t want to see me take on more projects than I can handle and get overwhelmed, but let me explain how that is not the case here.”

And honesty about my feelings worked in that moment. I explained to him how it’s actually pretty easy to start and hold these meetings and that it’s hardly any work at all, and not a burden, but instead something very motivating for me - I’ve learned recently at Weight Watchers meetings, that there is just something about meeting with a group of people weekly, who are in the same boat, that motivates you like nothing else.

After I explained more about it, he was totally on my side. The whole thing which could have turned into a huge argument between us, was solved quickly and easily. And the point is, he wasn’t getting down on me or trying to hold me back. He doesn’t believe that I’m not a capable person; he’s not mean and abusive (heavens no!). He just cares about me and doesn’t want to see me take on more than I can handle. He’s seen me at my worst and therefore, just as it’s his job to encourage me and believe in me, it’s also his job to caution me and remind me to think about things carefully before I dive in.

And I’m at a place where I can notice and remember where he’s coming from before I react to words that are not the whole story.

There are so many moments in life with a spouse that can go either way - huge fight or honest communication.

There have been many times when my husband has unwittingly said something to hurt my feelings. Instead of holding resentments against him and treating him badly in response, I tell him immediately that the specific thing he has said makes me feel bad. So far, this has always brought resolution. And, of course, I’ve often said things which I can tell have upset him - he won’t tell me that, but I can usually figure it out by his mood and silence - or else it is so apparent, I know the moment it comes out of my mouth. In these cases, I immediately apologize and tell him I would never purposefully hurt him, and that I should not have said whatever just came out of my mouth.

So I’d love to hear stories about your experiences. Can you identify any instances in which you’ve reacted negatively to what your husband has said to you, but instead of telling him that it has upset you and why, you become passive aggressive, or stubborn, or any number of negative behaviors that could have been prevented?

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