By Rose Calder
As an introspective person, I often find myself reflecting on life and the various twists and turns it takes. It helps inject a sense of wonder and amazement into my day, and helps keep me grateful that things haven’t turned out as horrid as I thought.
But of all the things that have turned out right in my life, there is one thing that still amazes me, and that is the fact that somehow I ended up being a housewife.
The reason this continues to surprise me isn’t a matter of arrogance. I don’t think of myself as being ‘too good’ for this kind of lifestyle, nor have I ever looked down on women for choosing this path.
It is more a simple matter of trying to figure out how somebody who couldn’t be less suited for such a position managed to wind up with the politically-correct moniker of ‘domestic engineer’. Because honestly, folks, I’m not cut out for this.
Chronic case of antsy-pants
As a child, I never bothered to learn such useful and traditional homemaking skills, such as baking, knitting or even how to sew on a button. I could say I was raised without a maternal figure, but the truth is anything that involved sitting still just didn’t interest me.
Back before the handy diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder, I was accused of having a chronic case of antsy-pants; I couldn’t be bothered to keep still when something didn’t strike my fancy, and nothing even remotely related to learning how to keep house struck my fancy.
I preferred to spend the day playing with my friends and doing things with my bike that involved a lot of iodine and bandages afterwards. Knowing how to properly cook a brisket or how to crochet an afghan didn’t even register.
Now that I am older, this has come back to bite me in the butt. To put it bluntly, my past experience would have served me better to live as a young bachelor instead of a married woman.
Many of my female friends and sisters-in-law are astounded that I am nearly 30 and do not possess the intricate knowledge of how to grill pork chops, nor do I know the difference between basting and hemming.
At least I’ve learned not to tell people that I fix buttons by super gluing them back on to the fabric, or that I have stapled the cuffs of my pant legs in order to keep from trampling on them. What can I say? It does work — for a while, anyway.
But even though I realise how positively laughable my domestic skills are now, I still can’t bring myself to learn how to do this stuff properly.
Pizza for breakfast
To me, spending hours glossing over recipes makes me yawn, and the idea of knitting a sweater while waiting for my dough to proof just seems monotonous. I can’t even find anything enjoyable in daytime television. I’d rather walk to the library and score some new books, take a walk with my camera or even take my bike out for a spin.
After several culinary disasters, my husband has taken over the cooking, whereas I focus on the cleaning. It seems to work, and he is not too fussed over the lack of intricately planned flowerbeds or a non-existent surplus of homemade quilts.
However, I have yet to bring him around to the concept that cold pizza really does count as a decent breakfast, no matter how many times I point out what percentage of the food pyramid is present.
—desperate@standardmedia.co.ke
