On Mourning the Housewife

All right then, since we’re on Awkward Topics, let’s talk about my employment status. Let’s just go there. I suppose the technical term for me is “underemployed.” I’m not unemployed, a distinction I feel is important. But the job I have is decidedly not full-time.

After I graduated with my MFA in 2008 (yeah, we’ll go there too—it’s been two years, two full years) I got a job working from home. I wrote stuff, edited stuff, did online stuff, and had to call people to try and convince them to set meetings with someone who would then try to convince them to move their business to our client city. I enjoyed (well, “enjoy” might not be the right word) everything except the calling, which I absolutely hated and dreaded and avoided if at all possible. On the side, I also copy edited for a local business.

I did this for about a year. Then, the recession hit. First, I lost the copy editing. Then, I lost the online job. I had already begun watching A, though, so I still had something. Regardless, I promptly felt depressed at my underemployed status and started looking for a job. Before I found one, though, Jesse and I had a heart-to-heart and we agreed I would take some time off from job hunting to focus solely on the book, which I was in the process of completely re-writing and which had taken a back burner since I’d been out of school.

And that’s been the past year of my life—two or three mornings a week of watching a toddler, the rest of the time writing. And keeping the house clean, and doing laundry, and grocery shopping, and cooking all our food, and washing our cars, and maintaining our lawn, and growing our garden. You know, that stuff.

Now, I’m wrapping up a draft of the book, ready to call it quits on that project (whether it works or not—I’m simply exhausted, creatively, and don’t know how much energy I have left for it). Which means my experiment in housewifery must come to a close.

I, of course, don’t want it to. Not working has confirmed what I’ve been suspecting for quite some time now: I don’t like work. I don’t like having a job. At least, I haven’t loved any of the jobs I’ve had, and I’ve had a variety. I’m much happier at home, cleaning the house and baking bread and doing all that stuff a good feminist isn’t supposed to like.

The inherent problem is I married a man raised in my generation, a generation very used to two incomes, a man philosophically on board with stay-at-home mothers but bewildered at the prospect of a stay-at-home wife. I can’t say I blame him. I know he’d rather stay home too. (Though I’m convinced that about two weeks of domestic chores and responsibilities would have him running back to the office.)

And while stay-at-home mothering seems to be experiencing, at least in my circle of friends, a comeback, a little stamp of Oprah-approval, the noble act of sacrificing career for the raising of productive citizens, I can probably forget about the possibility of the return of the housewife. Women make up more than half the workforce now. We’re better educated than men are, and we’re more likely to be managers (though not CEOs).

Today, I read Hanna Rosin’s article—“The End of Men”—in the new Atlantic and found it fascinating, and probably true. She writes,

Dozens of college women I interviewed for this story assumed that they very well might be the ones working while their husbands stayed at home, either looking for work or minding the children. Guys, one senior remarked to me, “are the new ball and chain.”

But, shhh, don’t tell Jesse. He might want to try a little experiment of his own.