Permission To Be A Bad Wife
"I'm a bad wife!" I will wail when my PMS and the laundry pile are at their worst.
Thankfully, my husband is not an eye-roller so the situation rarely escalates into hysterics.
He will usually just hug me and say "we have robots for that".
I'll sniffle and sob something along the lines of "but we don't have a robot to make dinner and there is no dinner..." to which he replies: "Just send the kid for Döner, I've been craving it all week".
Like most people, I keep an average house. Things are clean but not always tidy. Sometimes, the domestic spirit moves and everything gets Marie Kondoed, sometimes, the laundry gets put on right off the line without ever making it to the closet.
Intellectually, I know that I should not compare my home to what I see on Pinterest. I also know that people's homes are unusually tidy when they expect company and that many people have help around the house. Heck, I also have help around the house.
I know that with a day job and homeschooling a ninth-grader there is not much time left over for cleaning and tidying up. Especially when I also want to do other things.
I once sat down with a weekly plan and mapped out all the hours I spend on work, teaching Sean, maths, reading, writing, recording music, and recreative activities and discovered that no, I wasn't lazy. There simply isn't a lot of time left over when all is said and planned.
I know all this. And yet, when I don't make dinner or things get too out of hand in the laundry room I feel like a bad wife. The interesting thing is that I do not feel like a lazy person or a bad mother. I feel like a bad wife.
I feel this way even though my husband has never once complained about something around the house not being up to domestic code. If anything, he thinks I do too much. I feel this way even though my mother never had this type of domestic tit for tat going on with her husband.
"You are a bad wife if you do not make dinner" is not a concept I grew up with.
And yet, I must have picked it up somewhere along the way. This idea that homes have to be picture perfect and dinner has to be home cooked every day. Never mind that in Germany we do not even MAKE warm dinner. We have a sandwich with some cold meat or cheese on it and that's it.
Somewhere along the way, Suzie Homemaker got to me even though I am not even in the domestic arts by profession.
It is properly messed up.
It's not something I want to indulge.
So, this week, I am giving myself permission to be a "bad wife". I just sent Sean for takeout and the laundry will survive until Tuesday.
Seeing the gleam in my son and my husband's eyes suggests that they rather like when I am being a "bad wife". They really enjoy Döner.
