It's Your Turn

It all begins with a storybook wedding. Sex. Kids. And then either:

A) both parents work, children are cared for by someone else
B) one parent works, leaving the other parent as the “stay-at-home”
C) one parent works, one parent stays-at-home writing, and a housekeeper and nanny are hired

It’s a good thing she chose C.

Caitlin Flanagan has compiled a mope-conquering collection of essays examining woman’s work in To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife.

I first discovered Flanagan when I came across her article “Housewife Confidential” in the Atlantic. To Hell with All That includes an expanded version of this article which examines what the original housewife authors from Bombeck to Bracken had to say – don’t throw out your sense of humor with the dishwater.

Flanagan moves on to discuss the phenom of today’s mother’s little helper. Not valium. The nanny. After investigating the rise of the governess culminating in Disney’s Mary Poppins, Flanagan relates her own experience as the mother of twin boys and employeer of help more likely to be named Maria than Mary. Paloma, it turns out, is a godsend. She cleans, she cooks, she quiets the boys with a look. And Flanagan loves it. When she’s not questioning her own role in the whole endeavor.

After the boys have grown, Flanagan hires a housekeeper to take up where the nanny left off, which leaver her more time to manage the family’s schedule (and its clutter). Essays on both resonate and cheekily point out the ridiculousness of it all.

And then there’s the husband. Poor him. Really. He’s gone from the housewife’s main preoccupation to an afterthought somewhere between Little Gym and pet vaccinations in the stay-at-home’s day planner. Flanagan’s words from page 36:

“He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she’s jolly well in the mood…and still doing a slow burn over his failure to wipe down the countertops and fold the dish towel after cooking the kids’ dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his e-mail, catch a few minutes of SportsCenter, and call it a night.”

I’m going to tape that quote to my fridge. Just as soon as I wipe that crusty stuff out of the produce bin and alphabetize the chutneys.