“A woman’s place is in the house…and the senate.”
I was folding laundry this weekend and fantasizing about quitting my job. Not for a better opportunity, but leaving the work force altogether. In my fantasy world, Willis and I have more than enough income from other sources to maintain our life and I am able to stay home to read and blog and volunteer and have two martini lunches with friends.
But then I looked down at the mountain of clean wash I was working on and thought to myself, “I work a hell of a lot harder at home than I do at work. Perhaps I should stay where I at least get paid.”
It’s peculiar to me that the work I value the least pays the most and what’s really important pays nothing. Of course, I understand economics enough to know that no one is going to pay me to fold my own laundry, but sill, the repetitive drudgery of making beds, cooking meals and changing diapers is truly the foundation for healthy families and therefore a strong society, no? It’s work that never stays done. People keep eating the cooked food, wearing the clean clothes, and sleeping in the made beds. It all needs to be repeated daily in perpetuity. Perhaps that’s why it goes unnoticed and unvalued. But then again, if all of the work stopped getting done, it would become a crisis faster than a garbage strike.
That led me to fantasize about what would happen if all women went on strike from any and all domestic work. It would be a fun couple of days. But in the end, the mess would get bad enough that we couldn’t stand to look at it any more and the entire uprising would be for naught.
Perhaps I should turn on the TV when I fold laundry.
Often I do turn on the TV and get lots of clothes folded. If I can find a good TV movie I can get the whole house clean. I’ve been known to watch PBS all Saturday while I tend to housework.
When we were small my mom used to put us to be by 8:30 or earlier – then she would have her pepsi, iron and watch The Fugitive. That was her time – my dad worked evenings and didn’t get off until midnight.
In the end Meg, we don’t clean the house for payment or recognition. We do it because we love our families and want what’s best for them. Finally for me, a day home doing housework is real therapy. At the end of the day I can see what I did and that I did it for me no one else.
Yes I am old school.
In this series of books I read, set in the near future, there’s a thing called a “motherhood stipend” that mothers get to “compensate” them for just these kinds of activities. Too bad it’s a fantasy series! =>