I love my husband and my children ...
Posted on 01/01/2009 1:05:40 PM PST by CE2949BB
Many young women who saw this happen to their moms subsequently chased careers and financial independence so as to never be in that position of dependence. Then again, a lot of bored housewives started playing around on their hardworking husbands and destroyed their families too.
Yea, well, if you put up some wallpaper in the bathroom in 2005 and canned some pickles last summer, all I can say is that the wallpaper job was a $200 project that some man would have done in three hours and pickles are a dollar a jar at Krogers.
It isn’t at all about the money. But anyone who has lived in the suburbs knows that the average housewife these days is anything but productively engaged.
OK, there are still some pioneer women out in the country somewhere doing the 19th Century life. But, if you produce more than you eat, you have a job. You’re a farmer not a housewife. If you produce less than you eat, you are a piddler and need to just go to the grocery.
Taking care of young children is a full-time job. There's a reason that when a successful woman goes to work and has to hire a nanny to actually take care of her kids, she has to pay that nanny plenty--and the nanny will earn her money. If she has to hire someone to cook two or three meals a day, clean, do laundry, and run errands, she'll pay for a second person to do that. And she'll pay another to do the yardwork. These are the jobs that one housewife will do in the course of the average week. And trust me, the nanny, housekeeper, and yard man are not going to be wiping up kids' vomit at 3 a.m, spending hours with the pediatrician, making Halloween costumes, going to PTA meetings, volunteering in the church or classroom, or teaching their children to read.
Sure, there are some lazy housewives. They'd be lazy in the workplace, too. That's not the job, it's the individual.
Try being a housewife and mommy for young kids for a few months. If you do the job properly, you will find it's rewarding, but also tiring, and it's certainly more than forty hours a week.
Oh, Pleeeze. I have parenting experience. Not daddy goes to work type experience, but vomit and doctors office and making lunch and doing laundry and a costume type experience. And it ain’t a full time job unless you have diminished capacity or are trying to re-invent the wheel. There are a couple of years when little children benefit from a parent who takes full charge of their needs. But its still not a full time job unless you want the children to grow up to be needy liberals who expect the fork to magically appear in front of their mouths whenever they are hungry.
I love the bit about the husband and wife who are watching TV just before bedtime.
Wife yawns and says that she is going to bed. She goes into the kitchen and sets up breakfast for the next morning; stacks the old newspapers and picks up a stray toy; goes to the children’s rooms and lays out their clothes for the next day; locks the front door; does her nightly toillette; turns the covers down; and then goes to bed.
Her husband continues to watch TV for a while, then yawns, decides it is time for him to go to bed, too. — And he does.
So if you don’t think that women should stay home to care for their own children and be full-time moms,what’s your suggestion for child care? I mean, you don’t think it’s a full time job, but kids are certainly awake and in need of feeding, instruction, more feeding, diaper-changing, supervision, and carting around for 16 hours a day, so who do you propose does this work? Are you suggesting that we all consign our children to the care of daycare workers and alien nannies while we are out conquering the world or otherwise busying ourselves? I am serious here. The math doesn’t add up so I’d really like to know how you think a mother’s time should be apportioned and who is supposed to take care of the kids if she is devoting only part time to this work.
I work part time at a concert venue. As exhausting as the position might be some nights, I consider work my recreation.
It’s only in the last year that I went back to work. There is no way people who actually know me would not have anything to say about me. (now the in-laws might not have anything to say, but that’s because after all this time they still don’t know me). I do so many things and have so many interests. I take gigs and work p/t, but that comes after my home life.
The main problem in child care is that since mom isn’t doing anything, baby has to entertained nonstop. Now, mom can pretend to do some work, but putting some cinnamon buns in the oven isn’t real work. So, at the end of the day, baby is bored, mom is bored so activities have to be created. And, simple tasks dragged out to fill an otherwise uneventful day. Before you know it, the day is full. But with what? Five 10 minute feedings and four diaper changes? The rest is just “mommy piddling.”
I was fortunate enough to have a job that could be done with a baby in a backpack or on my desk. But, at most, child care was a two hour a day job. They eat well when they are a little hungry. If they aren’t hungry, then spend an hour on some applesauce. And, if you let em cry, bedtime is a snap. Down they go. Or, if you can’t stand the crying (a healthy outlet for infant emotions) then I guess you have to spend an hour or more talking them off to sleep.
This is nearly word for word the words in “Fascinating Womanhood”. A book that my husband referred to as “the joke book”. It found its way thrown across the room many times before I finally threw it out.
My now 26 year old was there when she was 12, too. NOW, she’s a grad student and questioning having kids or letting her hub work from home and her going out to the workforce. I’m hoping it’s a phase.
I stayed home for 20 years and raised my children. Now I”m working to help them meet their expenses through college.
I loved staying at home.
You have a perfectly horrible idea of what it means to be a wife and mother. You really only devoted TWO HOURS A DAY to your child? I pity him.
Your insults do not contribute to the discussion, rather, they show your insecurity with your position. I did not say I devoted two hours a day to my children. Re-read my post and you will see this. But, I siuspect that you already know that. I said that the job of child care was a two hour a day job, which it is. If you are a piddler who has made this delightful and simple task into an all day event, I pity you. Ask your grandmother how much time she spent on the child care part of her job.
I asked you politely who should raise the children if the mom isn't going to do it because it's such a brief and easy task and she takes herself off to work. (Very few people can take their children to work in a backpack.) The thread did not get an answer. Instead, you actually insulted those of us who chose to stay home and raise our children ourselves.
What I said was perfectly clear and consistent. You chose to try to parse it your way. Nice try.
I stayed home my 50% of the time. Every Tues. Thurs and every other Friday Sat and Sunday. 7 out of every 14 days. And, my kids (two of them 20 months apart) had a great time with me as I did my own work the other 10 hours a day. I knew how to do this since my father was also a work at home dad designing lighting systems from his office at home and raising three kids.
Ask grandma. She’ll tell you that your 16 hour a day child care job is just a joke.
My mother, my grandmothers, and most of my ancestresses worked their backsides off at home, whether living in the suburbs or in the countryside. Though the children were on deck every waking moment and needed supervision, teaching, etc., no one was “bored” and thinking of things to do; like them, when I was able to stay home my days were productive and full of constant work: the shopping, cleaning, cooking, errand-running, and sewing a family requires, as well as taking care of animals, painting the house, volunteering at church or charities, maintaining a vegetable garden, homeschooling the kids, etc. All of these things of course not only improve the minds of the children—homeschooled children are famous for lapping public school kids on exams, college admissions, academic prizes, and other scholastic honors—but free the husband to devote a lot of time to his career.
To bring us back to the subject of this thread, women who choose to be housewives: there is no way that a woman who works full time outside of the home has the time or energy to give as much and do as much after work as the woman who is at home from the time she gets up in the morning. If you don’t get home until 5:30 or 6, you can’t possibly be there to help your kids with a difficult math assignment when they get off the schoolbus at 3. You still have hours of chores and errands to do, cooking and perhaps laundry and other responsibilities, and there are only 24 hours in a day, possibly four hours between the time you get home and the time the kids have to be fed, bathed, and in bed. Call the involved mothers piddlers if you like (not clear on precisely what sort of insult this is intended to be, are you perhaps suggesting that we suffer from urinary incontinence?) but there are only so many hours in a day no matter how smart you are.
Now that I’m compelled to work at a full-time job outside of the home, I certainly don’t have the time or strength to give to my family as I used to, and we all feel the lack very acutely. Though I’m an unusually organized and productive person, there is no way everything that needs to be done can be done in four hours.
I don’t understand what pleasure you get out of denigrating the accomplishments and labor of others who are leading perfectly valid and productive lives as housewives. We appear not to have the same values at all. In any case, I’ll give you the last word so you have ample opportunity to criticize those of us who devote more time to our homes and children than you do. Be my guest . . .
” Trade off two great dinners for 2 hours of cleaning windows, etc.”
When I was 6 I made a deal with my mother that if she would clean up my room and make my bed I would bake cookies once a week.
The only drawback was that I had to leave the kitchen like I found it.
Why thank you there Ma’am, I will take your invitation for the last word. But, somehow I think we may be jumping the gun a bit. I could be wrong, and have been in the past, but I have the feeling that you are not quite done with this topic. (And, people puzzle over why 50% of marriages end in divorce).
I guess you must live in Arthur Illinois or Lancaster County PA, or be a visitor from a third world country because the world you describe exists for about one percent of all “housewives” today. Did you notice those little green stores popping up all over the place? You can get a cup of coffee there for about $4, or a glorified donut for about $5, and at 10AM they are busy as can be - with house moms among others. Kids are still out in the car or in tow, but these places are busy. And, there are 15,000 of these little stores. And they alone serve about 8 times as many customers every day as there are home schooled children in the US. And, they have competitors, lots of competitors.
Today, in my house, two ladies come in once a week and for $75 clean every one of the four and one-half baths, the kitchen, floors, linens, vacuum, dust, and trash removal. Everything else arguably “housewifing” is just picking up after myself. A task that does not require any additional time if done when it should be. Your list of tasks: Shopping (prophetically first on the list), cleaning, cooking, errand running, and sewing (I think I had the buttons on my cashmere topcoat sewed back on at the dry cleaners in 2006), make for a busy day if you are of diminished capacity. But they add less than an hour a day to the two hours of child care for a normal person. Home schooling, while laudable, is too rare to consider.
My thesis is and has been that the work expands to fit the time for it for those claiming title to the turf of “housewife.” I’m not against women or men not working outside of the home, I did it for 10 years. It’s the self-righteous indignation women who are lucky enough to have won this lottery have in criticizing the stupid oaf who doesn’t want to take out her garbage after spending 10 hours on his back under a truck all day that has brought me to this thread. And, if you go back and read some of the posts here you will either see what I mean or continue to miss my point.
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