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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How do I even blog under these conditions?!

It is time to begin my Clutter Kick for the year of 2010. I decided on Clutter Kicking instead of Clutter Busting, because it sounds fresh and new to me, and I need that feeling to get going.

Like many others, I’ve searched for answers in the past, but haven’t yet been able to implement them in my life. For instance, the FlyLady method asks you to “shine your sink every night” and I have NEVER been able to accomplish that. Perhaps if I come a this from different angles, I’ll finally be able to do that. Also, I’ve gone onto various websites devoted to organizing and they tend to make my throat squeeze up and give me anxiety. That isn’t helpful in getting my house in order! There is something deeper within me that I need to address.

So, for the rest of 2010, I’m going to explore Clutter Kicking ideas from Flylady.com, Clutterers Anonymous, Messies Anonymous, and where ever else I find useful ideas.

Today, I’m reading and pondering the ideas found in the first two brochures from my CLA kit that I received months ago.

The first idea that CLA presents is that the “dis-ease” of excessive cluttering is threefold - physical, emotional, and spiritual. Instead of giving organizing advice, they focus on providing support for facing the underlying causes of the self-destructive behaviors of cluttering. Like in AA meetings, when you go to CLA meetings, each person introduces him or herself with the phrase,

“Hi, my name is ____________________ and I’m a clutterer.”

Here are the Three Components of Cluttering, paraphrased from CLA’s Welcome brochure:

• Physical: The behaviors that result in the stacks, piles, and objects that fill our homes, cars, and workplaces.
• Emotional: The fog we create in our heads - resentments, unfinished thoughts, emotional baggage, daydreams, worries about the future, regrets about the past. With our minds in a constant spin, we lose today because our time is spent living in yesterday and tomorrow.
• Spirtitual: The deep emptiness we feel inside - that we compulsively try to fill by clinging to useless objects, nonproductive ideas, meaningless activities, and unstatisfying relationships.

Those who join a CLA group make a Responsibility Pledge:

I pledge to stretch out my hand and heart to those seeking help from our compulsion. Together we will ensure that CLA is here for us and all those who follow in our footsteps. And for this I am responsible.

© Paul Foreman, http://www.mindmapinspiration.com/

I like that! I know that when my family pulled together to help my mother this past Christmas and over the summer, I felt a deep empathy for those who are going through this without help or understanding. I am not a hoarder, but my clutter interferes with my happiness and serenety - and my ability to have people over! Whenever I make an improvement, I want to share my experience with others who might find it helpful.

So here I am! I’ll be sharing my successes and explorations in de-cluttering for the rest of 2010 and beyond.

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Here I am, tired on a busy morning. I have tons of school work and cleaning to accomplish before we go off skiing for the weekend. (This is our third year in Colorado, and only the first year we have skied, because we’re usually just barely getting through the week, without adding a lot of driving and exercise to the mix.)

But when I get myself to make coffee, put on some music, and this adorable apron that my talented little sister made me for a wedding, gift doing dishes without a dishwasher becomes a lot more tolerable. Almost fun! (Okay, that’s a lie!)

I love my pink dish gloves and various aprons. Aprons are especially important for me because we’ve lost the little round thingy that goes on the end of the faucet to direct the flow of water, so I always end up completely soaked in the front after doing dishes by hand. (I’ve also managed to break about 15 glasses this year. Housework is not my strong suit!!!!!! Hence, my extreme need for motivational attire.)

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One of the tons of wonderful things I’ve learned from my husband is how to make vinaigrette. He’s very anti-bottled-dressing (I’ve gently reminded him that I grew up in a single parent home and wasn’t even aware that there was an alternative, aside from ambitious, gourmet types).

It’s incredibly easy and it’s almost the only thing we put on our salads. The only bottled dressing we’ve used this past year is Annie’s Goddess dressing (and ranch, which we don’t put on salads, but which I use to dip many, many different foods into, from veggies to pizza.)

Anyway, it’s so easy that, although we were too tired to cook tonight and Tim picked up pasta from our favorite Italian restaurant on the way home, I still made a salad AND a dressing.

So how does one make a vinaigrette, you ask? The materials I like best are a small teacup (see photo), because I’m usually making a small salad for two people, and a fork to whisk with. I’ve tried a bowl and a real whisk, but for me, the fork works better (I also use it to scramble eggs for french toast batter).

Next, choose your vinegar. We have been using sherry vinegar lately, but in the past we have used red or white wine vinegar, or balsamic vinegar. I’ve also heard you can use lemon juice, but I haven’t tried it. For myself, I’ve used a fancy fig flavored balsamic vinegar that I bought for my husband and he never used once. I put this on a salad that featured strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries.

Put one or two tablespoons in the cup or bowl (eyeball it.)

Next, add seasonings that you would like to dissolve in it. I always add salt and cracked black pepper. You can mix it up by adding a dash of cayenne, as well, or white pepper instead of the black. This is also when we often add garlic. Usually a fresh clove pressed in a garlic presser. Raw garlic is very good for you but causes potent burbs, so beware!

The final ingredient before the oil is a tiny bit of dijon mustard. We sometimes leave it out, but it’s very good in the dressing. Try not to use too much.

Whisk a bit with the fork to mix the additions into the vinegar.

Finally, add extra virgin olive oil. A good rule is about 2:1 oil vs vinegar. If you are using a teacup, completely cover the top of the vinegar with the oil. Whisk, whisk, whisk, and taste. Add whatever you think is missing, toss on salad, and enjoy!

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I’m hard pressed to believe that anyone actually enjoys housework. It is something which simply must be done. One cannot allow the dust bunnies, toilet grime, and shower mildew to take over (though in my house, they have been allowed to proliferate robustly without actually hindering us from our duties in the outside world - it’s just gross, that’s all). But in fact, there is nothing in the constitution of women that is better suited to performing those household duties which prevent too much filth from accumulating. It simply falls to the person in the house who feels it is her duty to do it, or to the person for whom the tolerance threshold is the lowest. 

Division of Chores

For my good friend C, it is her husband who has the lowest threshold and who indeed does most of the housework. They each do their own laundry; he tends to do one load per day, and she tends to leave her clothes in the dryer indefinitely, with him removing them for his needs and then putting them back in to “fluff.” He sweeps and vacuums, dusts and mops, and stacks the things she may have left out on the one messy shelf in their house. Because it is understood that the existence of one dirty dish in the sink will give him an aneurism, they both rise after a meal and clean up the mess together. They are both in the habit of cleaning up messes as soon as they occur. They both seem to enjoy cooking equally. 

In my house this is not so. It seems both my husband and I have nearly equal tolerances for messiness. The problem for me is that I am the one most disturbed by it, but we have let things get so bad that I cannot bear to deal with it. And not once in the time that we have lived together has he ever decided to wash a dish or take out the garbage, without my having goaded him into doing it. 

Cooking vs. Baking

It seems that cooking is often done because one must eat, but baking is an art which imparts love and care to the household. There is no such thing in our home as the smell of fresh baking and the accomplishment and comfort that it provides: Neither of us are bakers. And the cooking, if it is done at all, it is seven times out of ten, done by him. I do my best to keep that ratio more even, but it seems, his threshold for getting sick of eating out is lower than mine.

Dishwashing

One difference is that dishes, unlike vacuuming, dusting, sweeping, mopping, etc, must be done or we cannot cook. That task unfortunately falls to me. Two facts which make that intolerable: we do not have a dishwasher, and he is unable to cook a meal without demolishing the kitchen. Hence, the constant state of my kitchen which I have illustrated in former posts.

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Whenever I hear someone wax poetic about the merits of menu planning, I get that sick, unworthy feeling. That “I call myself a woman? - I am such a failure,” spiral into feelings of hopelessness. Does that ever happen to you? For I am not strong, nor smart enough to menu plan! I cannot commit to making dishes all week long which are tasty and exciting enough so that my husband will not moan and suggest take-out. Whenever I read a health promoting book which provides a two week meal plan, I think, “Never mind. Too much work.!” 

I pray that someday this will change, (such as when I have children and I finally see the light about how menu planning makes life easier), but for now, I’m lucky if I get dinner on the table at all. 

So when I found another new-to-me website with a post on menu planning, I nearly looked away until I noticed the following lines:

How I use the internet to plan my menu

1. A few days before a new month, I open up my Google Calendar….

2. In a separate tab, I open my del.icio.us cookbook (you can read more about how I created one.)

~ From SIMPLEmom

So, I’ll read this new technique and see if it is for me. I like that you can organize your recipes on the Internet instead of bookmarking to them. Lord knows, I have too many bookmarks already.

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The fun, feverish, hallucinatory, meditative part of my illness has quickly left me for a scratchy throated, crappy feeling, in which I am fully cognizant of every darn thing I should be doing, but am not right now. I desperately need to clean my house this weekend. 

And so - for those of you who have been anxiously awaiting them since my post yesterday - my candid, kitchen photos!!! Please, do click on them to see them in their fully enlarged splendor.

I think the photos speak for themselves. Now, my housework experiment: Will posting these pics make me more motivated to clean this mess up by Monday? I’ll post pics Sunday night to prove whether or not I clean this weekend. 

Cheers!

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How to avoid doing housework #1: Get really sick. 

I’m sick today. Thank you elementary school kids! Sitting around in my PJs, coughing and feeling sorry for myself, I’m reminded of all the things I have to do. My computer has finally been fixed (Sort of - Hubby spilled liquid on it and the internal airport card no longer works and cannot be replaced - thank goodness they have this wireless USB thingy that allows me to use the Internet!). Anyway, I’ve always gotten some twisted (sick?!) pleasure out of getting sick. Before college, it meant that I could get out of going to school and turning things in on time. (In grad school, that never worked though.) And now, I feel like I’m actually justified in laying around feeling sorry for myself (heaven for a chronic depressive). But, I’m weird, and somehow, as I feel my body ache and tingle with fever, I manage to get into a meditative state and reflect on life and even feel some sort of pleasure and positivity. Maybe it’s the forced rest. 

And yet, my house looks like drug addicts live here. I’m serious. I was watching season five of Nip/Tuck on DVD yesterday, while imobile on the couch after work, and one of the charaters and his wife are addicted to meth and live in a pig-sty.

I looked into my kitchen….There isn’t a room in this house that isn’t riddled with clutter and neglect. 

If I were feeling better, I’d take a candid photo (see also) of it. But I’m sick and it’s just too much trouble (which is just an excuse, albeit a good one, because I don’t know if I’m brave enough to take a picture of all this). 

I talked to my mom a couple of days ago and she’s really struggling with work and trying to make progress on her house and hoarding situation. I wish life weren’t so cluttered with one thing after another, after another. I thought that going home with my older sister to help mom with her hoarding at the beginning of the summer was a life-changing event, but now, I’m almost worse off than I was before that. 

I know it’s just transition and not permanent, but damn it’s hard to keep it all together sometimes. How will I ever survive kids if I can’t even keep it together with just Hubby, Doggie, and me?!?

On a happier note, here is another beautiful mountain photo from our last summer trip:

PS. The title of this post came from an old nightgown I got for Christmas when I was thirteen and had stopped eating meat. It had a Far Side comic of cows standing on hind legs. One of them was grilling a hamburger and caption was of the other cow saying “You’re sick, Jessie! Sick, sick, sick!”

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Hey y’all. I have lots to catch up on on this three-day 4th of July weekend. As I’ve said, I had to go back to California for another week to help out with my mother’s house. The experience has been life changing and a great bonding experience for my whole family. Now it’s great to be back at home chilling with my husband and our dog. 

Here is a little example of the kind of stuff we did while we were in Cali - several before and after shots of the kitchen (the before pics were taken during the day and the after pics at night):

Enjoy your 4th of July weekend!

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In my last post I finally brought up my mother’s hoarding problem - which was the original raison d’etre of this blog (see my About Page). On our journey we have discovered two invaluable books that will help all of us work through the emotions and reasons behind the obsessive collecting. Overcoming Compulsive Hoarding, by Fugen Neziroglu, Ph.D., Jerome Bubrick, Ph. D., Ph. D., Jose A. Yaryura-Tobias, MD and Buried in Treasures: Help for Compulsive Acquiring, Saving, and Hoarding, by David F. Tolin, Randy O, Frost, and Gail Steketee.

They are both excellent resources for recovery from this particular affliction, and we are buying both books for mom and each of us sisters. 

They aren’t like your average, ubiquitous clutter-busting books, which talk about organizing and getting rid of stuff, but don’t really help the person with a bonafide compulsive hoarding problem. These books have proven techniques for getting to the root(s) of the problem: the emotional issues and erroneous beliefs that cause behaviors of acquiring and not throwing away to get out of hand.

We’ve also found a website - Clutterer’s Anonymous - which has lists for face-to-face suport groups as well as other resources. My sister and her good friend (whose mother we have recently discovered has the SAME PROBLEM!) took my mother to a meeting last Saturday and said that it was great. I’m so excited to hear what it was like and how it went!!!

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