Relenting

I wrote this back in November. I don't know why I never published it.

Some household tasks are mindless and unskilled, like the Dish Cycle or the Laundry Cycle, as I mentioned before. We generally consider these tasks to be drudgery; it's the work that Free to Be You and Me criticized in the song Housework.

Not all housework is like that, though. Some tasks require creativity, skill and attention — like cooking, for example. Sometimes I get tired of cooking cooking COOKING all the time but it's never boring. It's a chemistry experiment, for one thing. (Do not substitute hot sauce for dry mustard in your homemade mac n cheese. I'm just sayin'.) Flailing against the corporate grocery store interests me, too. I like researching local sources of healthy vegetables and eggs and meat; I enjoy the challenge of cooking in a such a way that one can taste the difference. And the dinner half-hour, the one time each day when the four of us sit together, is a great joy to me. Even with the wiggly, singing, sometimes-whining children.

You know, historically, when women didn't work "outside the home," they worked in it. They sewed or mended the family's clothes; they kept kitchen gardens; they fed the chickens; they cooked everything from scratch. Oh, and they also cared for the children. I think about that when I go about my daily household chores. I remember that what I do is just a remnant of that older, more demanding way of life. I'm glad household work is so much easier now — I've never once been inspired to wash clothes by hand! — but I do wonder sometimes if this remnant is like a pale hothouse tomato compared to one picked on a sunny August day in a garden.

Is that ridiculous? Am I romanticizing?

Something about managing a household makes me look backward, not forward.